Using customer behavior data to decide when to start your holiday marketing

With the summer winding down, murmurs of the Black Friday / holiday season have started up.

While you should definitely be preparing ahead of any busy season, when to actually scale up your marketing is different for each store.

One easy way to ballpark when to start is to look at your Customer Purchase Latency.

Customer Purchase Latency is a measurement of time between two purchases.

You can use this to help guide when you should start marketing. If your latency is 14 days (in-between purchases) then you could wait until 2-3 weeks before the event (e.g. Black Friday), but if your latency is 90 days then you could be starting your campaigns 3-5 months in advance.

Because latency is an average metric, I like to round it into a range when making decisions instead of just a fixed number.

You also want it to become lower (i.e. sooner) so starting your marketing early is an optimization. Using 100%-150% of the latency is a good start range (e.g. 14 becomes a range of 14 to 21 days before the event).

If you're using Repeat Customer Insights you can find a report on Customer Purchase Latency inside the app. I'd recommend using the 1st to 2nd purchase latency, as that's the trouble spot for most ecommerce stores.

Eric Davis