Customer defection happens when a customer should have bought but they haven't. Either they bought from someone else (competitor) or didn't buy again at all.
In either case, defecting when that happens can be a powerful trigger for customer retention. Get those customers to come back to your store and you can save a bundle on customer acquisition costs.
Customer Purchase Latency is the time between orders. Averaging it tells you how long the average customer takes in-between orders.
Plug that metric into an anti-defection campaign and you'll start to get customers coming back to your store.
When you get started, add a bit of a buffer to account for the averaging. An extra 25% is a good rule of thumb to start with. e.g. a latency of 60 days would become starting the anti-defection 75 days after their last order.
Average Customer Purchase Latency doesn't vary that rapidly but you still want to monitor and adjust every three months or sooner. That way as your customer behavior shifts, your campaign timing adapts.
My app, Repeat Customer Insights calculates a few Average Customer Purchase Latencies. There's the store-wide one, ones for various dates, acquisition sources, and even ones based on how many orders a customer has placed.
You can install it on your Shopify store and have it automatically measure these and dozens of other repeat customer metrics.
Eric Davis
Retain the best customers and leave the worst for your competitors to steal
If you're having problems with customers not coming back or defecting to competitors, Repeat Customer Insights might help uncover why that's happening.
Using its analyses you can figure out how to better target the good customers and let the bad ones go elsewhere.