The Repeat Purchase Rate is the proportion of customers that have shopped more than once with your company. The emphasis of this metric is on completing a second, later transaction to be count the customer as a “repeat”.
How to calculate Repeat Purchase Rate:
The Repeat Purchase Rate statistic is displayed as a simple percentage. It is calculated by dividing the total number of customers who have purchased more than once by the total number of customers.
Quick example: There are 1,000 customers, and 340 have shopped more than once. Your Repeat Purchase Rate would be 34%.
Why Repeat Purchase Rate is important:
The metric is centered around your customer retention efforts and is a great measure of loyalty to evaluate long-term performance. A healthy (and increasing) Repeat Purchase Rate confirms you’re providing increasing value to your customers, thus satisfied enough with the first product to stay engaged with your brand and purchase again.
Repeat Purchase Rates are tricky because they vary by category and niche, but the market agrees that a 30-40% range is a solid baseline for an ambitious team.
Repeat buyers work in all financial and economic models, and are essential to spur lifetime value in the business.
How to improve Repeat Purchase Rate:
Keep it personal
Once a customer has made the initial purchase the importance of your post-transaction emails become your best friend. This is your chance to show you are listening and rolling out the red carpet instead of dropping the customer in the general marketing workflow.
A loyal friend
“Creating a loyalty program can be as simple as rewarding customers on their second purchase at your store or after a set dollar figure. Your store reports makes it easy to see who your best customers are by dollar value and total number of orders.” Richard Lazazzera – A Better Lemonade Stand If you are new to loyalty strategy, check out our partner Smile.io.
Don't abandon ship
We know abandoned carts are frustrating, but also a low-hanging fruit. Create an email marketing campaign for your customer that slowly builds incentive for their next purchase. Think of this as a series of polite nudges based on your average time to reorder metrics.
Cross-sell when you can
Matching “this” with “that” is not only a way to reengage, but an opportunity to educate your customer on your entire suite of offerings. Never underestimate the knowledge the market has around your product.
