Retention rate is crucial for the success of any Shopify store. Retention rate directly relates to customer loyalty and repeat purchases while also helping to keep acquisition costs down.
Repeat Purchase Rate and Returning Customer Rate are two metrics that directly measure your customer retention. If you sell subscriptions, then churn is a great calculation for your retention rate (retention rate is the remainder of your churn, e.g. 5% churn means a 95% retention rate).
Measuring your retention rate regularly can give you a lot of information about how your store is performing in a variety of areas:
- loyalty strategy
- product satisfaction
- customer support
- product research
- customer education
New Customer Welcome campaigns, loyalty programs, and personalization are all effective ways to increase your retention rate. They take awhile to show results but many can run on auto-pilot with a bit of steering now and then.
As far the medium goes, not much can beat out email marketing. It's cheap, ubiquitous, and there's no large barrier to entry (a gatekeeper). What I like about it is that you can start simple and gradually expand it.
If you want to get your Repeat Purchase Rate measured automatically for your Shopify store, Repeat Customer Insights will calculate it for variety of customer segments, dates, and sales channels.
Eric Davis
Start noticing seasonal spikes in customer behavior
Cohort reports let you detect seasonal spikes as well as long-term retention cycles. Repeat Customer Insights can automatically create cohorts for your Shopify store, going back to your very first order.