Retention Dashboard Overview

Yotpo's Retention Dashboard provides actionable insights into your store’s retention performance and the customer segments and experiences that motivate them to come back and shop from your store to ultimately drive customer lifetime value forward.

It is designed to help you better analyze your retention performance within various timeframes in the last 12 months and execute a more robust customer retention strategy.

This data can help you:

• Analyze your repeat customer rate at a glance
• Visualize which segments are driving sales month over month
• Understand the trends in purchasing behavior between segments and identify your biggest areas of opportunity
• Engage customers throughout the retention funnel by acting on the most impactful campaigns that drive retention, thereby driving customer lifetime value forward

In this article, you’ll learn how to read and use the dashboard to make data-driven decisions that will effectively improve your retention strategy.

Dashboard metrics

Selecting the time frame

• When looking at a particular time frame, the dashboard will only show data for full days. For example, If you’re using the last 30 days filter, you will see data that pertains to the last full 30 days.
• The selected time frame is compared to the previous equal date range. For example, when choosing the 30-day time frame, the data will also be compared to the previous 30 days to see how the numbers are trending.

Key metrics

This section shows a high-level breakdown of how your business is performing in terms of repeat customers.

Total sales

The total revenue from sales received from your eCommerce platform within the selected date range. This includes all line item prices, discounts, shipping, taxes, and tips in the shop currency.

Sales from repeat customers

The percentage of sales that came from repeat customers in the selected date range.

These are sales to customers who made at least 2 purchases in the last 12 months out of all customer sales within the selected date range. This metric showcases the impact of repeat customers on your overall sales.

Calculation:

Let's look at an example where the selected date range is the past 30 days:

If you made $100 in revenue within the last 30 days, and $45 out of the total revenue was spent by customers who made at least 2 purchases in the last 12 months, your repeat customer sales rate for the 30-day time range will stand at 45%. This means that 45% of your revenue for this date range came from repeat customers who returned to your store.

Total Customers 

The total number of unique customers who purchased with your store. If the same customer has made more than 1 purchase, they will only be counted once.

Repeat customer rate

The percentage of repeat customers in the selected date range.

These customers made a purchase within the selected date range and at least 1 more purchase within the last 12 months.

Calculation:

Let's look at an example where the selected date range is the past 30 days:

If 100 customers made at least 1 purchase in your store within the last 12 months, and 15 of them made their second (or more) purchase within the last 30-day time range, the repeat customer sales rate will stand at 15%. This means that in the last 30 days, 15% of all customers are customers who shopped with you before and returned to your store to make additional purchases.

Customer segments

In this section of the dashboard, you’ll see a breakdown of the different customers that shop at your store.

The segments are calculated by dividing the number of customers that qualify for a segment in the selected date range by the total number of customers that shopped at your store in the selected date range.

Each customer segment includes the following metrics:

• Avg. sales per customer - This shows how much money was spent on average by a customer in the segment during the selected date range.
• Total sales - This shows how much money was spent in total by this customer segment in the selected date range.

Customer segment definitions

One-time 

• Made a single purchase within the selected date range
• Made no additional purchases in the last 12 months

Calculation:

Returning

• Made a purchase within the selected date range
• Made at least 1 additional purchase in the last 12 months

Calculation:

Frequent

• Made a purchase within the selected date range
• Made at least 2 additional purchases in total in the last 12 months

Calculation:

How to use the dashboard

Evaluating retention metrics

The Retention Dashboard is meant to be a tool for your store to consistently monitor retention performance over time and get recommendations to build a strategy to improve customer retention.

With the data in the Key Metrics section, you can have a consistent view of how your store's sales are performing in a given date range. In addition, you can determine how your repeat customers influence your store's performance. These metrics will give you an indication of what percentage of customers are new vs. repeat customers if your store relies more heavily on first-time customer sales vs. repeat customers.

Since your repeat customers tend to spend more at your store vs. a one-time customer, it's important to ensure you build a plan to retain more customers. This dashboard will support you in those efforts.

Within the customer segments, you can see which segments have the highest average sales per customer and understand that an increase in customers in those higher-spend segments will influence your overall sales.

Observing trends

Each metric will have a green or red next to it. These arrows and colors help you understand trends that continue throughout the reports to show positive and negative changes as compared to the previous time frame.

• The green arrow indicates that the metric has improved in the rankings and the trend is positive
• The red arrow indicated a decrease or negative trend

For example, if there's a green arrow showing a 5% increase in a 30-day time period, this is compared to the number from the prior 30 days.

Exporting data

You can export data from the board at any point for further analysis. You can find the Export data button right next to the date range picker.

Data can be exported in the following formats:

• CSV
• PDF
• Microsoft PowerPoint

Taking action

The Retention Dashboard provides different customer engagement actions at the click of a button.

These recommended actions are aimed at increasing retention for each specific customer segment.

For example, you can engage new customers and encourage them to subscribe to store SMS and emails.

Although this is beneficial no matter where your customers are in their journey with you, it's most likely that new customers will not yet be subscribed. Therefore, for the First-time segment, we'll recommend an action like offering a loyalty reward for SMS sign-up.

As another example, your frequent buyers have purchased at least 3 times. These are high-value customers and you want to be sure you keep them. Therefore one of our recommendations is offering VIP members in this segment a special reward on their next purchase.