Time Between Purchases – RetentionX

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

Definitions

The Time Between Purchases Report shows the number of days between all the consecutive orders made by your customers, so that you know the time it takes your customers to repurchase. Let's take a look at our definitions:

Purchase	Step from one order to the next one
Median Days	Middle number of days between the purchases in the sorted, ascending list of all order gaps
Average Days	Average days between orders
Customers	Number of customers who placed the follow-up purchase

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

We recommend using the median of the number of days between purchases when interpreting this data. This way, extreme values (outliers) are not weighted heavily.

Use Cases

The Time Between Purchases analysis is the actual 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:

Encourage purchases at the right time
Re-engage at-risk and dormant customers
Avoid wasting of discounts for customers who would buy anyway

Step 1: Find the perfect time for your reactivation campaigns

The Time Between Purchases 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.

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: Create 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.

It is important to analyze the purchase frequency separately for each order number as the time between purchases usually decreases with every subsequent purchase.

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Definitions

Use Cases

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