🤔 What does the Returning Customer Rate Report tell you?
Returning customers are essential to an e-commerce business. They’re less expensive to retain compared to acquiring new customers. Moreover, they tend to buy more per visit and spend on more expensive products. Ultimately, returning customers are more likely to sign-up for a newsletter or follow you on social media.
So, it should be a part of your routine to track the returning customer rate alongside other customer retention metrics. Let’s look at it in a bit more detail and learn how you can track it using reports in Synder.
⚖️ What is the returning customer rate and how to calculate it?
Basically, the returning customer rate is the percentage of customers who purchased more than once. To calculate it, you need to know the overall number of your customers and the number of those returning. By formula, the calculation looks as follows:
Returning customer rate = Number of customers who’ve purchased before (returning) / Total number of customers × 100
The returning customer rate is exactly the metric that helps you see the tendency of customers to come back and estimate your likelihood of winning customer loyalty. Moreover, by tracking its change, you can evaluate the success of your marketing activities in numbers.
There’s no such thing as the ideal returning customer rate (or the right one), as much depends on your niche. However, a popular opinion for e-commerce is that 20-30% of returning customers means the business is doing well.
🔎 What can you learn from the Returning Customer Rate Report?
The Returning Customer Rate Report allows you to break down how your business is going, so you can see and analyze fluctuations as they occur and react in a timely manner.
- Track the growth of your returning customer rate over time.
Compare your current rate with previous periods to see whether it increases or decreases. This way, you can evaluate the performance of your retention marketing efforts or see how testing this or that tactic resulted.
- Analyze the performance of your sales channels.
You can filter the data by sales channels to look at the returning customer rate for each one separately and better understand what could affect it.
- Learn more about your customers.
Segment the report by country, region, or payment gateway to analyze the readiness of customers to buy from you again from different angles and see where improvements will be welcome.
📈 How can you improve your returning customer rate?
With all this data at hand, you may have a data-driven action plan on where to put more effort into building customer loyalty. And here are some actionable tips you can apply.
- Offer a great customer experience
Look at how convenient it is for your customers to buy from you and what you can do to improve their experience across your channels. Think of going the extra mile by offering small incentives at checkout, free shipping, etc.
- Follow up with your customers during the post-purchase stage
Keep communicating with your customers after the purchase to encourage them to buy from you again. You may track the time between purchases to identify the best moment for your emails with promotions or new arrivals. Use your customer data to segment your customers and send personalized offers that resonate with them.
- Offer your customers a loyalty program
It’s a great way to show your customers that you value them. Try thinking of something fun and rewarding to encourage customers to participate. You can also go a little further and make your program tiered, offering more valuable benefits or exclusive promotions to those who spend more.
You can think of even more things that can encourage your customers to stay longer with you: from the most obvious, like engaging with them via social media, to the possibility of tracking the shipping of their orders (this is, by the way, an often overlooked practice with a great potential to drive more sales).
The Returning Customer Rate Report at Synder helps conveniently track your customer retention success over time, better understand where more effort is needed, and quickly evaluate the impact of changes applied. Use Synder Insights and combine it with other customer reports to get more valuable insights into customer behavior and tweak your marketing strategies accordingly.
