Your Repeat Purchase Rate should hold steady or improve as customers place repeat orders. This shows that they are engaging with your store and products.
A Repeat Purchase Rate drop-off is where there's a significant drop in your rate based on a clear behavior, usually from one order to the next (e.g. first to second orders, second to third orders, etc).
A significant drop-off in the repeat purchase rate can be a sign that your customers aren't re-ordering and are defecting to your competitors. It could also signal product dissatisfaction.
How to improve your drop-offs
To improve your repeat purchase rate drop offs, you need to increase trust with your customers earlier in the lifecycle. They need to look at you as a trusted store or vendor that they enjoy shopping with.
This can take a variety for forms but for Shopify stores, these are the more effective ones.
- Regular email marketing that provides them value (e.g tips, entertainment)
- Regular email marketing about sales and discounts
- Loyalty and rewards programs
- Making sure you reward loyal, repeat customers as well as or better than new customers
- Early communication to solicit feedback and reviews about your products to catch product or service issues.
You can also create win-back campaigns to try to get past and defected customers to come back to your store.
Note
It's common to have drop-offs at specific points, the step from Order #1 to Order #2 is a very common one as some customers will are only interested in buying once.
Eric Davis
Retain the best customers and leave the worst for your competitors to steal
If you're having problems with customers not coming back or defecting to competitors, Repeat Customer Insights might help uncover why that's happening.
Using its analyses you can figure out how to better target the good customers and let the bad ones go elsewhere.