A Shopify store using Repeat Customer Insights recently asked me:

I see that once a customer orders 2 & 3 times, they become long term customers, and that is my challenge. Do you have any specific suggestions on how to do this?

Getting one-time customers to buy again is the central challenge for the majority of ecommerce stores. That behavior takes work to earn, but once you’ve got it to be repeatable then retention and loyalty becomes nearly effortless.

The best strategy I’ve found is building a New Customer Welcome Campaign.

These campaigns bring in a lot of different tactics and techniques all with the purpose of getting that 2nd order. Once that happens, your regular retention campaigns can take over and keep a customer.

This is such an important area that I’ve built an area in Repeat Customer Insights specifically for getting one-time customers to buy again. I named this Focus on: 1-to-2 Customers.

There’s advice on building New Customer Welcome Campaigns in the app as well on my website.

One last point I want to make. Even though this is hard work, you should start to see gains with every little bit you release. Even if you can’t focus 100% on it right now, working on this campaign a little bit each week or month will start showing results.

Eric Davis

Use cohorts to find out who the best customers are in your Shopify store

Repeat Customer Insights will automatically group your customers into cohorts based on when they first purchased. This will let you see how the date customers bought would impact their behavior.

Install Repeat Customer Insights for Shopify