Uncover repeat purchase trends with Klaviyo’s cohort analysis

The problem

With smarter customer acquisition and skyrocketing ad costs top of mind for B2C businesses, it’s more important than ever to improve retention.

Marketers are often tasked with driving better conversion and repeat purchase rates, but they can’t access the information they need to identify trends like:

• How many weeks or months does it take for someone to make a purchase after subscribing to marketing?
• After customers make their first purchase, what percentage of them make a repeat purchase within 3 months?
• How does purchase behavior vary if someone’s first purchase was during BFCM?
• What percentage of customers unsubscribe from SMS in the same month they subscribe?

It’s hard to map out repeat purchase behavior and slice it by timeframes or products, and even more difficult to keep it updated regularly. But understanding when customers buy is critical to taking a data-driven approach to customer acquisition and retention.

At Klaviyo, we hear from countless customers who want to grow customer lifetime value by understanding what drives a first and repeat conversion. Our flexible cohort analysis makes it easy for marketers to answer key questions about trends in customer behavior.

The solution

Cohort analysis groups customers based on how and when they convert, so you can identify trends in purchase patterns at a glance. Once those trends are clear, you can confidently decide which strategies to continue investing in—the right marketing campaigns, ad channels, and product promotions to drive long-term revenue growth.

To create a cohort analysis, you need:

• A cohorting event: the first event to track, for grouping customers based on when they took this action
• A reporting event: the performance metric to measure over time, to see when and how often customers take this action

Klaviyo’s cohort analysis comes with 4 pre-built reports based on top questions from our customers, and endless ways to customize. It’s most useful to track differences in performance across different channels, products, or timeframes.

1. Post-purchase

Find out how often customers make at least one follow-up purchase within a year after their first purchase. Take it one step further: Filter the cohorting event by a specific product to understand if certain products drive more frequent follow-up purchases.

2. Repeat purchases

Identify how often customers make repeat purchases. Take it one step further: Filter the cohorting event by “contains discount code” to see if discounts lead to loyal customers.

3. SMS consent to first order

Track how long it takes for someone to make a purchase after they subscribe to SMS marketing. Take it one step further: Update the reporting event from “Placed Order” to “Active on Site” to see how often customers browse your site after subscribing to SMS.

4. Email consent to first order

Track how long it takes for someone to make a purchase after they subscribe to email marketing. Take it one step further: Filter the cohorting event by “double opt-in” to see if the added step results in better retention over time.

Klaviyo’s cohort analysis helps marketers determine what’s working and which strategies drive the best long-term results by tracking behavior like when customers place or cancel orders, visit their website from various traffic sources, and subscribe or unsubscribe from marketing.

Learn more about how to build your own advanced cohort analysis.

Access the report today

This report is exclusively available for customers of Klaviyo Marketing Analytics and Advanced Klaviyo Data Platform (Advanced KDP).

Log in to check it out in your Klaviyo account.