The post below was submitted to us by nomorerack, a fast-growing online shopping destination with an avid team of RJMetrics users.  To see what RJMetrics can do for you, get started with our 30 day free trial today.

At nomorerack.com, our goal is to be the go-to online shopping destination for those who want quality brand name apparel and accessories for up to 90% off retail. A key to achieving that goal is having a deep understanding of our customers’ behavior.

In this post, we outline our methods for maintaining a consistent, deep understanding of our customer base that evolves with our data.

Quest for Customer Insights

Our long-term success is strongly dependent on client satisfaction. We’re focused on making sure that our customers keep coming back, refer their friends and help our community grow.

To better understand our customer base, we wanted to use important metrics like revenue per user (RPU), time between purchases, and cohort analysis. It was critical to us that we be able to access these metrics on-the-fly as our data changed and segment them by things like acquisition source. Understanding the returns we see from different channels is critical because it tells us which avenues are most effective and where we should be directing our resources.

To address these needs, we went looking for an analytical tool that allows non-technical team members to pull frequently updated reports and run queries via a simple user interface. It was also important that we get up and running as quickly as possible. We looked to the cloud.

Cloud Business Intelligence

A quick search led us to RJMetrics, which provides hosted data analytics software. We reached out to them and signed up for a free 30 day trial in which we asked to measure those key metrics like RPU, lifetime revenue (LTV) and repeat purchase patterns.

Vishal Agarwal, our Director of Business Development, signed up for RJMetrics on a Friday and was running these critical reports by Tuesday of the following week. By Thursday, our whole team was trained on RJMetrics’ system. Within a week of signing up, we were already saving many hours that were previously spent on report generation and data exploration.

Another unexpected plus came as a result of RJMetrics’ experience in working with e-commerce companies like ours. RJMetrics has developed a suite of best-practices metrics that are readily available out-of-the-box. Through cohort analysis, we are able to group customers by their registration dates and analyze their subsequent purchases over time on a single chart. This exercise was brand new to our team and would have taken us hours to build in Excel.

We knew this subjectively but the cohort chart confirmed that we had an amazingly loyal customer base. Customers acquired in November 2010 have continued to spend the same amount with us month on month, right till date. This was extremely encouraging evidence that our customers love our products and are far more valuable than just the amount of their first purchases.

While we were very focused on acquiring new subscribers, what was very surprising that 70% of our revenue always came from existing customers.

RJMetrics also helped us optimize marketing dollars. Their “repeat purchase probability” and “average time between purchases” metrics helped us in planning email triggers and targeting specific audiences within our user base. We also learned that only 5% any given day’s sales came from users who registered on the same day, which encouraged us to place increased focus on converting new users.

To share these metrics internally, we leveraged the “syndicated dashboards” feature in RJMetrics. This feature allows us to share common dashboards such as “sales,” “supplier” and “marketing,” with different teams internally. This way, management can clearly communicate with key teams through one set of metrics. No more exchanging multiple emails with messy excel spreadsheets and end of the day reports.

 New Insights Every Day

Once we started digging into our data using RJMetrics, we realized that its scope is much wider than just calculating cohorts or LTVs. RJMetrics became a one stop shop for all of our data needs – from basic revenue reporting to the more complex analysis of ancillary data sets.

The beauty of RJMetrics is that it can incorporate any data that lives in our backend database. Every time we start tracking a new data field, RJMetrics can incorporate it into our hosted data warehouse, and we are able to start charting it in a matter of hours. For example, we just started analyzing customer surveys and not only are we able to analyze customer satisfaction and chances of repeat purchase, but we are also linking this data to its respective products and vendors. This allows us to measure company performance through suppliers, products and deal campaigns. In other words, our customers are now actively defining what we sell.

Conclusion

We chose to rely on a third-party service to enable the analysis of our backend data and we are thrilled with the results. Rather than re-invent the wheel, we left it to the experts at RJMetrics and have been able to reap the benefits extremely quickly.