Ensure you're keeping your most loyal customers

Once you start measuring your most loyal customers (like the VIPs and Above Average customers), you're able to do a lot with the metrics you collect.

One that I find useful is to graph how many loyal customers you have over-time. This lets you easily see trends and loyalty problems.

In a healthy store that's growing, you should see both increasing over-time. They might not grow at the same rate but they should be consistently growing.

If they flatten, that's a sign that you're losing loyal customers that aren't getting replaced by new customers. This should be a wake-up call to get to work on your loyalty systems.

If they go down, you're well into the problem and need to do whatever you can to keep customers around. Hopefully you'll notice any flattening trends early and prevent drops.

The new Who Are Loyal focus inside Repeat Customer Insights will automatically graph how many VIPs and Above Average customers you have. It uses the historic Customer Grid data that's collected every month so merchants who've had the app for awhile will have a lot more historic metrics showing up.

But even if you just signed up recently (or plan on signing up in a minute), the sooner you start to collect this data the better.

Eric Davis