I've been hinting at a new feature in the works for Repeat Customer Insights for awhile now.
It's finally released...
A major influence in customer behavior is how they were acquired. A customer who learned about you from a close friend is going to behave vastly different than one who saw your ad while scrolling Facebook.
Tracking and reporting on that data is big business. That's the customer acquisition and attribution stuff you might have heard about online.
But many of those systems are transactional: once a customer purchases then attribution is done. It'll start over when that customer comes back in 12 months and attribute the sale to something else which downplays the importance of the original source.
The customer acquisition source feature I added to Repeat Customer Insights goes beyond that.
It uses Shopify's built-in order attribution (which is quite good) and will carry that attribution through the lifetime of the customer.
So when Lily buys in-store using your POS system, every order they place will credit your POS channel as the order source. It was your physical store and its marketing that attracted them to purchase, even if subsequent purchases are made online or elsewhere.
With this first release, 21 different order sources are tracked and reported on including many of the most popular: your online store, Shopify POS, Shopify Draft Orders, Android, iPhone, and BOLD Checkout.
I'll be adding more over-time too. One downside is that Shopify doesn't supply apps with all of the channel names so it takes some Sherlock Holmes'ing to figure them out.
The acquisition sources are available on the Store Analysis, Customer Purchase Latency Report, and the Customer Export. They'll appear in more reports later on, as I wanted to get the first version out before the holidays so you can use it with your planning.
These new segment options are available now to Repeat Customer Insights customers with Entrepreneur or Growth accounts, with the Entrepreneur account having a limited set.
If learning more about which sales channels produce the best long-term customers, it would be a good idea to Repeat Customer Insights soon.
Eric Davis
Discover where your best customers come from
Going beyond simple attribution, Repeat Customer Insights lets you analyze and segment your customers by who first sent that customer your way.
This will let you find the best sources of long-term customers, not just anyone who orders.