Measuring Customer Lifetimes

I've been wanting to write about analyzing customers based on their customer lifetime (how long they've been ordering).

I've written on cohorts quite a bit but cohort analysis only covers the time of a customer's first order. It doesn't deal with their lifetime as a whole.

Knowing a customer first ordered in December of 2019 is useful (from cohorting).

Combine that with a customer lifetime of 350 days and now you know a lot more about them:

• they placed an order in December, probably for a holiday, maybe for a gift
• they placed their last order in late November or December the next year
• they haven't come back to place any more orders, probably defected

Knowing your customer lifetimes can open up a lot of interesting ideas and help you better understand their behavior.

With the latest release of Repeat Customer Insights, now every customer's lifetime is calculated automatically. I'll be building more analyses in the future based on that data (e.g. average lifetimes, defect detection, offer timing).

For now, if you're a customer of the app the lifetime data is ready to go. If you're not a customer yet, you can install and have your customers analyzed automatically.

Eric Davis