One big strength of many eCommerce platforms is their built-in analytics, where you can see how important marketing and eCommerce metrics change over time. Nowadays, awareness of these metrics is a huge advantage in bringing success to a business. This series, therefore, will walk you through how to access one important customer satisfaction metric: the Repeat Customer Rate.
As a refresher, the Repeat Customer Rate shows the percentage of customers who have made more than one purchase. If you need a full review, you can read our article here. Else, you can now start following this guide!
This metric is sometimes labeled as the Returning Customer Rate depending on the platform. To find it, open your analytics dashboard or reporting tool. Look for a section that highlights customer behavior or purchase frequency. There, you’ll typically see a box or chart showing the rate of returning customers along with how it has changed compared to a previous time period.
The returning customer rate metric has to be supported by other relevant customer data to make sense. For our example above, the dip in the metric is due to a first-time customer. So the dip is not bad news! In fact, if you are consistently getting a 100% returning customer rate, then that means you are not gaining new customers for some time, and that's bad news! The next section will help you look for more customer data for a better overview.
Clicking on the Reports option under the Analytics option on the left panel will load various analytics reports. One of these is the Customers box.
The box lists links to tables containing important metrics related to customer behavior. They are as follows:
Customers over time - simply displays the number of first-time and returning customers over a period. You can customize the period as days, weeks, months, and years.
First-time vs returning customer sales - divides the total sales into the contributions of first-time customers and returning customers over a period.
Customers by location - lists the location of your customers worldwide in a table.
Returning customers - lists the customers who ordered more than once, including the date of their first purchase and latest purchase, the number of orders to date, and the total price of the items they purchased.
One-time customers - lists the customers who ordered only once, the date when they ordered, and the total price of their purchase.
While most platforms offer access to customer metrics, checking them manually every day, week, or month can get tedious. If you'd rather not spend time repeatedly digging through dashboards, consider using an integration tool that pulls your conversion funnel data and other key metrics from your eCommerce and marketing platforms, like ours! This way, you can focus more on analyzing your data and less on tracking it down.
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