Measuring the results from marketing tactics from month-to-month with RFM

A Repeat Customer Insights customer emailed asking how to measure improvements in their customer segments each month:

We are putting together a strategy of measuring our tactics in these numbers. A few items we are hoping to look at is what % of our customers are at risk, what percentage have defected and what percentage did we win back each month.

Any recommendations on how to slice and dice the data to figure this out?

There's two ways to slice the data:

1. The Customer Grids automatically takes snapshot of how many customers are in each segment on the 1st of each month. Using those, you can review and compare how the specific segments changed from month-to-month both in actual numbers and percentages.

The limitation with this approach is that if e.g. Mary comes back from Defection Risk but John moves from Loyal to Defection Risk, your number will look flat (0 net) but since Mary reactivated it's actually a good thing.

2. A stronger but more difficult approach is to track who is in a segment each month and compare them from month-to-month. e.g. Mary went from Defection Risk Loyal to Defected Loyal and then reactivated back to Loyal.

Lot more tracking and data management needed each month, but it's a more robust view if you have enough customers to make it worthwhile.

Personally I'd start with option #1, see how that goes for a few months, and what changes you notice. If needing to know exactly who moved into and out of a segment does come up, you can always invest more resources into option #2 later.

With the month coming to an end this week, if you want to get a snapshot of your customer segments for May then you'll want to install Repeat Customer Insights and make sure you have an account with saved month-by-month Customer Grids (Entrepreneur and up).

Eric Davis