Repeat customers are the lifeblood of any major store, ecommerce or physical.
Without repeat customers you'll struggle every day to attract enough sales to keep in business.
Repeat customers spend more
Repeat customers tend to spend more in each order than new customers. The trust you built with them in their prior purchases can convince them to buy again and again.
Repeat customers buy more often
Repeat customers also buy more often. The more purchases they've made, the sooner they tend to buy again.
Having more purchases sooner means you'll have access to the cash sooner which means you can put it back to use for your store. Added up over time, this means a faster growth rate.
Repeat customers cost less to keep
The thing to make repeat customers even more enticing is that it costs much less to get an order from them.
Acquiring a new customer requires a significant amount of time, money, and effort. It's also highly competitive in some markets where there's only so many customers around. It's common that a customer's acquisition cost might be 50-100% of their first order amount.
Repeat customers on the other hand can be "acquired" for a fraction of that amount. Some will just buy automatically so you're only out your fixed cost and cost of goods. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach repeat customers and it costs pennies to reach them.
Keeping their loyalty
The difficult part of repeat customers though is keeping their loyalty. Once they've ordered, you have to work to keep them around.
That work might entail loyalty programs, discounts, or plain-old customer service.
Articles for further reading
The newest articles are at the top.
- Repeat Customer
- Time your marketing to when a customer is likely to reorder
- Convert one-time customers into repeat customers
- Measure repeat customer loyalty by combining two metrics
- Prove yourself to your customer
- Automatic Segments give you advice to reach and convert your repeat customers
- Welcome your new customers
- Calculating the value of a repeat customer
- RFM analysis for Shopify stores: a comprehensive guide
- Three areas to focus on for strong repeat customers
- The compounding advantage of Repeat Purchase Rate
- Retaining the best customers requires defining what makes them the best
- Don't damage customer loyalty before they even buy
- Getting the 2nd order from one-time customers
- The holiday anniversary campaign to bring back customers
- Repeat customers should be placing larger orders and increasing AOV
- Calculate the percentage of customers who ordered again using a cohort report
- Measuring which new customers should be placing their second order soon
- Timing your promotions to convert new customers into repeat customers
- Use the repeat customer ratio to evaluate how well your Shopify store is performing
- Your repeat customers can become your store's safety net in lean times
- For more repeat customers, focus on getting second orders
- The odds are against you
- Manage holiday customers properly so they become repeat customers next year
- Educating new customers by sending a mini-booklet with each order
- Not rushing the results can create a better outcome
- Creating a simple limited-time offer without giving away discounts
- Why should your customers come back to your store?
- How marketing strategies mirror plant lifecycles
- Email checklist to boost repeat customer purchases
- Be clear on why customers should come back to your Shopify store
- Post-holiday slump or post-holiday bump
- Using product education to attract new and retain repeat customers
- Get 1 out of 3 customers to buy again
- How a single bad customer service experience can lose a repeat customer
- Free shipping causing funky buyer behavior
- How to identify, track, and retain repeat customers in Shopify
- Making your Shopify store more efficient is worth the effort
- How likely is each of your products to create repeat customers?
- Going beyond your customer's expectations
- How some contractors keep winning our repeat business
- Three marketing campaigns every Shopify store should be running
- First Product Analysis: find which products create better customers
- Give your repeat customers your best offers
- Using personal outreach to build new customer loyalty
- A simple, quick email campaign you can use with your best customers
- Use free samples to win a second order from your repeat customers
- Have conversations with customers to learn what they really need
- How the Customer Purchase Latency metric can guide subscription frequency in your Shopify store
- Analyze which Shopify sales channels produce your best repeat customers
- Earn easy repeat customer revenue in Shopify with subscriptions
- Your product line determines customer loyalty
- How to assemble a VIP customer list in Shopify
- Is your Shopify store helping to accelerate repeat customer purchases?
- Start the month with a bang by using email marketing with your Shopify store
- Spotting behavioral changes in your customers
- How to understand what a customer cohort is doing
- A personal tale of how product durability impacts repurchase rates
- The difficulties when customers only order once a year from your Shopify store
- How deleting old products can lose you repeat customers
- Knowledge (about your customers and products) is power
- Nudging the customer to make a second purchase
- Should you purge old email subscribers?
- How knowing your Repeat Sales Percentage can help your Shopify store
- Uncovering your potential best customers
- My #1 tip to improve customer retention for Shopify
- How Repeat Customer Insights creates 30+ segments automatically in Shopify
- The critical step in turning your new customers into repeat customers
- Dangers of using Lifetime Value with your Shopify customer acquisition plan
- How three phone calls can save a high-value subscription
- Today's short tip: improve the customer relationship
- Predicting customer orders using Customer Purchase Latency in Shopify
- The adventure of the Wildwood hoodie
- Thinking about your best customer
- Earning repeat customers when you only sell a single product in your Shopify store
- Are your repeat customers too shy to buy or are you not building enough trust?
- Delight your best customers by adding incentives to large orders
- Repeat Purchase Rate, and how to calculate it
- Are your customers smelling the smoke and defecting?
- Accumulate repeat customers with customer purchase latency and win-back campaigns
- How to convert more one-time Shopify customers into repeat customers
- The day after your marketing campaign sunsets
- The one step that decides if a Shopify customer will become a repeat customer
- Does ad relevance matter?
- How you request for customer feedback can make you sound like a drone
- Giving the gift of moldy brownies, how not to reward repeat customers
- Encouraging your best customers to buy from your Shopify store again
- How to find the optimal time to email your store's customers
- 4 reasons why your ecommerce store's AOV is an awful metric
- Evaluating a store's repeat customer metrics with a high Average Order Value but slow latency
- Remarketing strategies to acquire and retain new and repeat ecommerce customers
- How to discover why your Shopify store's average order value keeps shrinking
- Discover your store's weaknesses: automatic metric drop-off detection added to Repeat Customer Insights
- Measure how much of your Shopify store revenue originates from repeat customers
- Why Customers Disappear After the First Sale -- and How to Keep Them
- Switching to a metrics-based approach to ecommerce marketing
- 5 reasons to contact repeat Shopify customers
- When should to email your customers to get repeat purchases?
- Your ideal customer path for repeat purchases
- Why a high repeat purchase rate is an excellent measure of your store success
- The tiny hinge that swings your customer retention process
- How much additional revenue do repeat ecommerce customers contribute? 10%? 20% 40%?
- Simple Shopify customer retention using an outreach email
- An easy way to treat your repeat customers better
- Learn how to create a simple customer retention process for your ecommerce store
- Introduction to Customer Purchase Latency
- More Sales, Same Customers: Using Private Apps to Suggest Additional Merchandise