The season is underway and you're deep into campaigns to bring in new customers. You're thinking about budgets and acquisition costs. But the easiest win is closer to home than you think.
Do you actually know when your customers repeat? And is that the best moment, or could you nudge them towards a more interesting one?
This article covers how to assess repeat behaviour, but also whether your loyalty marketing is actually set up right. Your customer decides earlier than you'd expect, and if you're available at the right moment with the right offer, you don't need to convince them.
How to know when your customer normally comes back
In part 1 I explained why repeat rate per acquisition period is the measure that matters. To know whether your loyalty marketing works, you need a second number: your purchase cycle. That's the median time between two consecutive purchases by a returning customer.
Use the median, not the average. Outliers distort an average. The median gives you the number where half your returning customers repurchase sooner and half later.
How to calculate it: take all customers who've made at least two purchases, calculate the number of days between purchase 1 and purchase 2 for each, and take the median of that series. That's your purchase cycle.
A simple example: five returning customers with gaps of 95, 240, 310, 370 and 420 days between their first and second purchase. The median is 310 days. That means half your returning customers come back within ten months, the other half take longer. That's your baseline.
The cycle differs by business. For the business in this example it typically sits around an annual rhythm. For an online shop it could be weeks, for a B2B service provider sometimes more than a year. The calculation is the same. The number is yours.
One thing you might overlook: the difference between when the customer makes the purchase and when they use the product. Sounds a bit abstract, but in hospitality it's very concrete: someone who books in October for a stay in June next year was acquired in October. If you only start communicating in April because that's when the season starts, you're too late. The decision was already made, somewhere in winter, behind a screen.
Look at your own rebooking or reordering window and it tells you something about your loyalty marketing too. A window that's longer than expected, or longer than last year, is rarely coincidence. It's a signal that customers are delaying their decision, or that you weren't there when they were ready to make it.
What's the best moment to get a customer to repeat?
In most cases the perfect moment was yesterday and the second best moment is today. What I mean is: right after the purchase is usually a good opportunity. Two months later works too. The only thing that matters is that you don't leave any of those moments unused.
Let's stay in hospitality for a moment. Say a customer has just had a great experience and wants to come back. But they can't book yet.
A large portion starts looking for alternatives. Those who wait get reminded of the experience a month later, or get a trigger via Google Photos or social media two months on. At those moments they consider booking with you again and check whether they can. Still not possible? Something else it is, then. They wanted to come back, but you've lost them. Meanwhile you're wondering whether the experience wasn't as good as the review suggested, or whether it was the price. You're thinking about ways to reactivate them, when all you needed to do was make sure they could at least buy again.
Fixed family weekends, annual traditions, recurring groups: those decisions are made earlier than you think. And if you're not there, someone else picks them up.
A healthy repeat curve declines gradually. Many repeat purchases shortly after the previous one, then a tapering tail as time passes. What I've seen at several businesses with poor loyalty marketing is something different: a flat zone early in the curve followed by a spike later in the year. I call that flat period the dead zone. It's a signal that something needs to change in how you activate customers and make it easier for them to repeat.
That it can be different is measurable. The moment a customer leaves or receives their purchase, their satisfaction is at its peak. The experience is fresh in their memory, the rush of peak booking season hasn't started yet and the competition is quiet. The customer doesn't need to be convinced of the value of a next purchase either. They've just experienced it themselves.
At a business I work with, there's a loyalty promotion that encourages customers to lock in their next purchase shortly after their current one. Customers who used the promotion reordered with a median of less than a month. Customers without the promotion took ten times longer. The price was virtually identical in both groups, so there was no rate loss. The decision was pulled forward, nothing more. Every purchase you lock in earlier also contributes to customer lifetime value sooner.
A direct discount works, but the risk is that you create an expectation you have to repeat every time. Better to give loyal customers priority. They get to buy before the general public, which means they get the best availability. That advantage costs no rate loss and feels like a reward without you having to manufacture scarcity.
A well-timed email in the days and weeks after the purchase pulls repeat orders forward that would otherwise come months later, and takes them out of the competitive field before they even enter it.
Who is overdue and what do you do about it
Once you know your purchase cycle, you also know who's late. Someone whose last purchase was longer ago than the median cycle, and who hasn't bought again since, is overdue.
In businesses with an annual cycle, that's a large share of the customer base. The shorter someone is overdue, the better the chance that a targeted email with a concrete offer will land. After two full cycles, the likelihood of return becomes statistically small and your energy is better spent on the warmer group.
Whether your loyalty marketing works shows up in the data
Points programmes, discounts for loyal customers, VIP statuses: those instruments have their value, but they miss something. Your customer decides to come back on their own timeline, shaped by their experience, the season, and external triggers you don't control.
What you do control is whether you're there when that decision happens, whether your pricing is available and your offer is ready.
Whether that works doesn't show up in open rates or clicks. You see it in the repeat rate of the cohorts you reached versus the ones you didn't. You see it in the shift of the rebooking curve: are customers booking earlier than last year? That's the signal.
The purchase cycle is the compass. Without that number you're communicating at the wrong moment, and then it doesn't matter much what you say.
If you want to calculate your purchase cycle but don't know where to start, or if you suspect your loyalty marketing is hitting the wrong moment, I can take a look.