Acquiring customers is becoming more and more expensive. That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on your retention and customer lifetime value.

Once you open the Retention feature, Metrilo will show you a graph of the overall customer loyalty to your eCommerce business. Your customers will be grouped based on the number of orders they generated. You can easily see if you have regular customers or high amount of one-time buyers. The smaller the “1 order” group, the better your customer loyalty. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on this graph and work on having less one-time customers, whose acquisition is expensive. Returning customers, on the other hand, pay off their acquisition cost and, since repeat purchase indicates satisfaction with the service, you may expect referrals.

Customer retention is always measured by cohorts – sub-groups of customers who share the same characteristics or experiences – interest in the same products, or use of the same device, for example.
 This is why the main graph that you see first in the Retention tab (featured above) serves as an average point for comparison between the different cohort groups, but is not precise enough for you to make conclusions on it alone.

Metrilo automatically identifies some of your customer cohorts and tracks retention and customer lifetime values for each one of them. You can choose to measure three different types of cohorts based on:

A cohort is a filter of sorts and you see enough actionable information about each one so that you can compare different customer groups and fine-tune your strategy.

You can sort the customer cohorts based on these insights (both ascending and descending) by clicking on the column titles. For instance, clicking on “Revenue” will sort your orders from highest total revenue to lowest total revenue. Clicking it once again will sort it from lowest to highest.

Also, as you can see, under the graphic there are several important indicators, which give you a quick idea of how your’re doing:

For more details on Customer Retention, you might find this article in our Metrilo University helpful.