One of the most common questions you may want to answer is: what do buyers purchase next? With CRM you can analyze all purchasers or limit to purchasers based on specific product data, such as category, subcategory, or additional provided data.
Analyze Based on Purchase Number
The simplest way to analyze what buyers purchase next is to view customers based on purchase number. You can create a CRM insight tile to answer questions like: what do contacts purchase on their 2nd order? Or 3rd order?
Necessary Data
The most important data point in this insight is called Nth Order in the Orders data.
Nth order represents the specific order in a customer's history. Filtering results to Nth order equals 2 would analyze a customer's second order, whether they have only purchased twice or have purchased ten (10) times.
The additional data needed will be dependent on the specific type of analysis you are looking to do. For example, you may want to break insights down to the specific product level, category level, or subcategory level. Use the data in the Product data to select how to identify your items. In addition, you may want to be able to rank the top product based on your breakdown. Common breakdowns include merchandise revenue, order items quantity, and contacts count.
Building an Insight
The tile below is analyzing top product categories purchased on a second order based on order items quantity, or the number of individual items purchased in each category.
📌 You can replace any of the data points based on how you want to break down your data. In addition, you may want to add additional filters, such as orders placed within a timeframe.
💡 Create a tile using the Contacts Explore.
Navigate to or search the identifier for products you would like to use and add to your data section by selecting the data point. E.g. Category
Repeat this same process for any additional data points. E.g. Order Items Quantity.
Navigate to or search for Nth order and click the filter button when hovering over the data point. In the filter section, insert the order number you would like to analyze. E.g. 2.
Add any additional filters to the results, if desired. E.g. Category is not null to remove products that do not fall into an identifiable category.
Select your insight format in the visualization section.
Click Run.
If desired, open the edit menu to adjust the appearance of the visualization. E.g. limit the number of products displayed in the visualization. This can help you focus so you can directly act on the information.
📌 Additional Ideas
Add more than one measure to compare the number of contacts and the number of items ordered. Do customers tend to purchase a quantity greater than 1?
Use the Nth order filter to evaluate more than one order (e.g. 2, 3, 4) by adding Nth order as both a filter and a pivot to gain more insight on customer purchase lifecycle.
Add order date filters to identify purchase behavior changes over time.
Analysis Based on a Purchased Product Attribute
A second layer of analysis you may want to do about purchasers is what a customer purchased after they purchased a specific product or products.
There are two parts of this analysis:
Create an audience for the customers who purchased the initial product(s). You may want to identify contacts who purchased a specific item, a category of items, a size, or any other product data attribute.
Analyze the audience to see what additional purchases have occurred.
This type of analysis unlocks a large number of potential analysis. In the example below, the goal is to identify customers who purchased the category of Shirts on the first order. Then, further analyze this group to determine what categories they ordered on any subsequent purchases.
Creating the Audience
The first step is to create an insight that identifies the audience you want to further analyze. In order to create a CRM audience your insight must include the Contacts Count measure.
⚠️ An audience is created on one contacts count measure. If you are looking to target contacts who could be broken into two different data rows with a dimensions (e.g. category shirts OR category pants) use a filter to limit categories instead of dimensions.
💡 Create a tile using the Contacts Explore.
Navigate to or search for the Contacts Count measure and add to the data selection.
Select the single number visualization.
Add any selected filters to limit your data. Some common filters are listed below.
Add an Nth Order filter to limit to a specific purchase. E.g. 1
Add a Product Attribute filter to limit what products a customer must have purchased. E.g. Category Equals Shirts
Add an Order Date filter to limit when purchases occurred.
Click Run and then Save on your tile.
On the dashboard, click on the numeric value of the tile created and select Create Audience from the menu.
💡 It will take some time for the audience to process into the CRM and email database. The larger the number of contacts being analyzed the longer it may take.
Additional Analysis
After the audience has processed, you can analyze the contacts who are currently members of the audience. In tis example, the analysis will explore what categories are purchased on additional orders.
💡 Create a tile using the Contacts Explore.
Navigate or search for Audience Membership and add it as a filter so you can select your newly created audience in the filter section.
Navigate to or search the identifier for products you would like to use and add to your data section by selecting the data point. E.g. Category
Repeat this same process for any additional data points. E.g. Order Items Quantity.
Navigate to or search for Nth order and click the filter button when hovering over the data point. In the filter section, insert the order number you would like to analyze. E.g. 2, 3, 4.
If evaluating more than one variable of a dimension (e.g. Nth Order above) add a pivot based on that measure.
Add any additional filters to the results, if desired. E.g. Category is not null to remove products that do not fall into an identifiable category.
Select your insight format in the visualization section.
Click Run.
If desired, open the edit menu to adjust the appearance of the visualization. E.g. limit the number of products displayed in the visualization. This can help you focus so you can directly act on the information.
In this tile, you can see the number of items purchased in each category during a customer's 2nd, 3rd, or 4th purchase for customers who purchased from teh shirt category on their 1st order.