How George Sylvain, Co-Founder of Social Print Studio, uses cohort analysis to target users with the right message at the right time.
In the 2010s, emerging eCommerce brands were caught up in the glitz and glamor of customer acquisition — often at the expense of their bottom line. But VC dollars don’t flow as freely in 2024, and investors now expect brands to prioritize profitability. And one of the quickest ways to achieve profitability is to focus on retaining customers, not just winning them.
Today’s eCommerce brands should prioritize retention and LTV at every stage of the customer journey. Whether you’re using email marketing to nurture bottom-of-the-funnel relationships or paid advertising to appeal to customers at the top, you should approach every interaction with the intention of making it last.
"Increasing LTV is even more beneficial to your bottom line than lowering CAC. Getting a customer to make that second order is where you really make your profit." — George Sylvain, Co-founder of Social Print Studio
To build these lasting relationships, you need a series of data-driven marketing strategies. More specifically, you need to be able to break down your customers by cohort to understand what makes each group tick and target new and returning users accordingly.
We sat down with eCommerce marketing guru George Sylvain, Co-Founder of Social Print Studio (SPS) and former VP of Fellow Coffee, to get his take on how brands can leverage cohort analysis to drive retention and LTV.
The importance of cohort analysis in an LTV-focused marketing strategy
As a leading technique for understanding customer behavior, cohort analysis is the cornerstone of any LTV-driven marketing strategy. However, decoding the intricacies of your customers’ behavior can require some serious data chops and access to the right tools.
It's true that most brands allocate plenty of time and resources to analyzing the data surrounding their marketing efforts. But they don't always have reliable access to granular cohort data, meaning they must rely on surface-level metrics like click rates and revenue per recipient to inform their strategies.
But George says these metrics only tell half the story. Usually offered by email platforms like Klaviyo, generalized metrics can only gauge how individual campaigns or flows perform. “Your insights can’t be confined to a single flow,” he insists. “To drive LTV, you need to be able to track consumer behaviors over time to uncover purchase cycles and form granular segments to target.”
Why Social Print Studio needed cohort analysis to support its marketing strategy
As a seasoned marketing veteran, George deployed a number of strategic campaigns to promote SPS’ products, but his existing tech stack couldn’t verify if his efforts were working. With so many customers and products on so many different journeys and purchase cycles, uncovering actionable insights using surface-level metrics was a seemingly impossible task.
[Guest book product image]
Take his experience marketing SPS’ wedding products. The popular printing service company’s wedding-related SKUs naturally outperformed many of its other products in sales. However, George’s team had specifically focused on promoting the wedding guest book. Figuring most people need guest books before they need wedding albums, George’s team had been using that SKU to woo people planning weddings — whom they assumed to be the highest intent for printed photos.
Yet, despite pouring substantial ad spend into the guest book, George’s team couldn’t determine if it was truly the hero SKU they’d believed it to be. Although they had begun promoting their wedding album to purchasers of the guest book, there was an unexpected lag between the first and second purchases. It wasn’t clear whether or not the guest book had been encouraging LTV.
And Klaviyo wasn’t much help. It showed George’s team how much revenue per recipient their wedding album flow had brought in but not the total revenue both SKUs had been generating over time.
The intricacies of the customer journey ultimately eluded both George’s gut assumptions and his existing tech stack. That’s why he turned to Segments Analytics.
[Guest book product image]
How George turned Social Print Studio’s cohort data into a powerful LTV driver with Segments
Segments’ advanced analytics reporting and AI-powered segmentation instantly provided SPS with the cohort analysis capabilities it needed to drive LTV across the funnel. George and his team can effortlessly identify which SKUs attract what customer segments, uncover product-level purchase journeys, and determine the bottom-line impact of their efforts.
Before diving into Segments’ cohort analysis capabilities, George’s team first used the platform to answer a timing question: Why was it taking guest book customers so long to purchase wedding albums? With Segments’ product journey and product lifecycle features, they were able to identify purchase intervals and determine the size of each segment that had purchased both.
What they found was surprising: The interval between each purchase was closer to 140 days – not the 60 they had originally bet on. Had George’s team known to account for how unduly long it takes people to get their wedding photos back, they would have been able to time their flows more effectively and drive more repeat purchases.
But the insights didn’t stop there. When they performed a cohort analysis of different groups who’d purchased the guest book, they made an even more impactful discovery. Despite high sales, the ARPU of guest-book-first customers was only 15% higher than the price of the product. Meanwhile, the ARPU of album-first customers was 65% higher. And acquisition costs were the same in both cases.
Customers who purchased the album first were, in other words, driving better LTV than customers who purchased the guest book first. Unlike pre-wedding customers who were still a ways from getting their photos back, post-wedding customers were rife with fresh memories to print. The album, it turned out, was the true hero SKU.
"It’s easy to make assumptions about what your hero products are based on what you know about people’s lives and purchase habits. But what you really need is a powerful analytics tool to gut-check those assumptions — because the products that build LTV aren’t always the obvious ones."
These revelations led to two actionable takeaways:
- SPS should target guest book purchasers with email flows pushing the album 140 days after the original purchase date.
- SPS should double down on top-of-funnel ad spend on the album to target newly married users.
George says these insights have since driven substantial LTV for SPS. “Being able to track the movements of each segment has profoundly reshaped our approach to retention marketing,” he says. “With Segments, we can make every marketing decision with complete conviction.”
Why George recommends Segments as your single source of truth for cohort analysis
After twenty years in eCommerce — far too many of them without tools like Segments — George knows the value of a low-lift consumer analytics solution. In fact, his strong conviction in the product even led him to partner with Segments as a Marketing Advisor.
George recommends the platform for its pre-built (and customizable) segments and in-depth shopper insights. Its segmentation capabilities enable you to slice and dice your customer base any way you want to identify which groups have the most LTV potential, which are most at risk of churn, and which fall somewhere in the middle. Meanwhile, Segments’ shopper insights provide detailed intel on product journeys and purchase cycles to ensure you’re pushing the right SKUs at the right time.
Of course, as much as George enjoys the actionable marketing insights, the fact that Segments doesn’t require any coding or data science expertise certainly doesn’t hurt either. And, in the rare instance that he has a complex question its intuitive interface can’t answer, he can always leverage the on-demand access to a live data scientist that the Enterprise Plan provides.
Having attempted to internally build a consumer analytics solution — backed by an in-house data science team, no less — George can’t emphasize enough how much easier and more effective Segments is.
"Segments makes insights that used to take hours to uncover blindingly obvious. I’ve built full data science teams less powerful than Segments’ Shopify app."
Are you ready to level up your marketing strategy with cohort analysis?
See how Segments helps high-growth eCommerce brands like ILIA and St Frock drive effortless LTV from their marketing efforts.
Book a personalized demo today.
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