I frequently get questions from Repeat Customer Insights customers about the Cohort reports. It's one of the most popular reports and for good reason.
A well-structured cohort report can answer questions about your customer behavior that no other report can. Basically it'll show how groups of people (a cohort) behave over-time.
In the app, the cohort groups are based on when a customer first orders, which is a key moment in ecommerce. It's likely all of those customers were exposed to the same offers, sales, and general buying environment (e.g. holiday shopping, summer half-off sale). These first experiences will determine much of their later behavior.
While cohort reports can work with any store, they are best with stores that have regular or recurring purchases. Or stores attempting to grow their repeat purchases, which is why they fit in with Repeat Customer Insights so well.
A cohort report for a store with automatic, recurring monthly subscriptions can automatically draw out a ton of data that subscriptions reports focus on (e.g. customer churn, revenue churn, up/downgrades).
Because of their nature, cohort reports will be constantly evolving and updating. I recommend checking on them every week or every two weeks (smaller stores).
Eric Davis
Market to your customer's timing
Figure out how long customers wait in-between purchases and you have a key component for your marketing timing. This is the basis of the Average Latency metric and Order Sequence Report in Repeat Customer Insights.