Optimizing your marketing and customer engagement strategies in a Shopify store demands a deep understanding of purchase intervals. This guide delves into what purchase intervals are, their significance, and how you can effectively track them across different customer segments.
Metric Definition
Purchase Intervals, also known as the purchasing cycle, time between purchases, days between purchases, or repurchase interval, represent the average number of days between purchases per customer. This metric provides invaluable insights into how frequently customers are returning to make additional purchases, enabling businesses to tailor their marketing efforts more effectively.
What's Purchase Intervals and Why It Matters
In the unpredictable world of eCommerce, knowing when a customer will make their next purchase can be challenging. Purchase intervals vary significantly based on customer needs and product categories, making it crucial to understand these intervals at a segment level. Properly timed customer communications and marketing initiatives can enhance customer engagement, while inappropriate timing can detract from it.
Purchase intervals literally represent the "true frequency" of customer purchases. Incorporating with purchase intervals (e.g., Purchase Interval / 30) helps determine how often customers make purchases within a month. This metric is also essential for RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis, where the challenge lies in defining what makes a customer "active" or "at-risk" based on the recency of their last purchase. Purchase intervals provide a baseline for setting these thresholds.
Furthermore, the Average Lifetime Value of a customer is composed of the Average Order Count and Average Order Value, where Average Order Count is further influenced by the Purchase Interval and the customer's Lifetime Duration. Shortening the purchase intervals within targeted customer segments can increase the Average Order Count and improve Lifetime Value, making it a key factor for focused marketing efforts.
How to Track Purchase Intervals Overtime
Monitoring the shortening of purchase intervals within your targeted or resource-invested customer segments is critical. The effectiveness of retention marketing efforts can be gauged by observing whether the purchase intervals for all repeat customers or within specific segments are decreasing over time.
However, many tools capable of segmenting customers fall short in tracking or even displaying the values and trends of repurchase intervals. This is also true for Shopify's admin panel. ECPower addresses this gap by providing the capability to automatically track the purchase intervals of your customer segments after they have been created.
Delve into Purchase Intervals History
From the moment you create a segment, ECPower provides the capability to visually track its Purchase Intervals history through graphical representations. This feature allows for an intuitive understanding of how the segment has evolved over time.
Should you wish to delve into the segment's metrics prior to its creation, a specialized process is available to reproduce this historical data. For detailed instructions on accessing these retrospective insights, please consult the following guide:
