Time Between Orders

Repeat customers are the bread and butter of any business - so you better know yours! The Time Between Orders report helps you to map the typical time span between purchases to outline the lifetime behavior of your customer base. So let's take a look!
 

Definitions

It's crucial to understand when your customers are making repeat purchases. Since new customers who have just discovered your brand behave differently from loyal customers, RetentionX calculates the time between orders based on the number of orders placed.

Let's take a look at our definitions:

The average vs. median days are shown as color-coded line charts followed by absolute figures:

Use Cases

The analysis builds the basis of lifecycle marketing. It helps you to understand the usual time span between successive orders in order to determine a reasonably scientific, calculated marketing strategy based on the purchasing behavior of your customer base:

1. Encourage purchases at the right time

2. Re-engage at-risk and dormant customers

3. Avoid wasting of discounts for customers who would buy anyway
    

Step 1: Find the perfect time for your reactivation campaigns

The Time Between Orders report helps you to understand the regular buying behavior of your customers. The median days between purchases indicate when the customers’ follow-up order is overdue. Only when this time has passed, customers should receive additional inspiration or incentives.

If the median days between the 1st and 2nd order is e.g. 103 days, all customers who placed their first and only order more than 103 days ago are overdue.

Based on that, RetentionX automatically projects an estimated next order date for each customer and flags those who were expected to purchase again but haven’t yet; i.e., the ones who have passed their projected next order date.

Step 2: Segment your overdue customers

To put these insights into action, we need to identify the customers we want to work with based on customer segments.

For this, segment all overdue customers who haven’t yet placed the number of orders required to achieve loyalty. E.g., all overdue customers who have shopped either once, twice, or three times. Taking one-time buyers as an example, the segment conditions are as follows:

 

Step 3: Build dynamic audiences

To engage with these customers, start by connecting your favorite marketing platform to RetentionX. Thereby, you can push your segments as audiences to those. Unlike traditional customer lists, segments are dynamic, meaning they grow as customers meet the segment conditions, and shrink when they no longer meet them. Use your customer segment to create audiences which target your overdue customers, reaching them at the right time.
 

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