The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the next best time is today.
Just like the best time to review your customer retention is continuously, the next best time is today.
Retention is usually ignored by Shopify stores until it's too late. It's not as attractive or click-baity as customer acquisition, but that's what makes it such a powerful technique.
Depending on how important you make retention for your store, you might decide to look at it every day.
I like look at retention metrics once or twice a week. Since my app is a subscription app, it's pretty consistent from day-to-day. A store selling one-off products might need to review their metrics every month while one that sells at a high-volume might check it everyday.
When it's time to review, look at these metrics and compare how you performed last month, last year, and then historically over all-time:
- Repeat Purchase Rate or Customer Retention Rate, depending on if you sell more one-off or subscription products
- Repeat Sales Percentage
- Customer Purchase Latency
Reviewing each one for big changes (positive or negative) should only take a couple of minutes each time. Though you'll usually want to dig into why each of them changed, but that can lead you to ways to improve in the future.
You can get a hand reviewing these metrics in your Shopify store by using Repeat Customer Insights. It calculates many retention metrics automatically for you across various time periods and even segments the metrics by how the customer was acquired.
Eric Davis
Market to your customer's timing
Figure out how long customers wait in-between purchases and you have a key component for your marketing timing. This is the basis of the Average Latency metric and Order Sequence Report in Repeat Customer Insights.