How to Approach Loyal Customer Strategies on Shopify

We explain the importance of loyal customers and how to leverage loyal customer data in your CRM.

Shopify merchants pursue various goals — increasing sales, building brand awareness, and more — but the key to achieving sustained growth is acquiring loyal customers.

In this article, we explain why loyal customers matter in e-commerce and how to grow their numbers.

For a comprehensive guide to CRM on Shopify and how to use Klaviyo from the ground up, see the article below. If you want to understand the full picture, please check it out.

StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to support business growth through detailed operations that manual management cannot achieve, as well as large-scale execution of campaigns. If you're struggling to increase sales on Shopify, feel free to reach out. =>Download our free service introduction materials here

Loyal Customers: The Key to Growing Your Site

First, let's explain what loyal customers are and why they matter.

What Are Loyal Customers?

Loyal customers are your best customers — the top spenders who drive the most revenue.

We've previously discussed the relationship between LTV (Lifetime Value) and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) (How to Monitor LTV and CAC on Shopify and Aggressively Improve Profitability). A business is considered promising when LTV is at least 3x CAC. For this reason, loyal customers are often defined as those whose LTV (calculated on gross profit) is at least 3x their CAC.

As the saying goes, the top 20% of customers account for 80% of revenue. Loyal customers are the engine of profitability and the foundation of brand reputation in e-commerce.

Understanding Your Loyal Customers Through Data

Do you have a clear picture of the number and spending of your store's loyal customers?

For example, the following is based on fictional data, but it shows customers segmented by annual purchase amount: under ¥50,000, under ¥100,000, under ¥300,000, under ¥500,000, and above.

When loyal customers are defined as those with annual purchases of ¥300,000 or more, there are only 28 such customers — about 1% of the total — but they generate approximately ¥7.16 million in sales, roughly 5% of total revenue, which is too significant to ignore.

In this example, purchase frequency increases as customers move from Rank E to D to C. Meanwhile, average order value also rises gradually from Rank E to C, but not as sharply as purchase frequency.

Given this pattern, it becomes clear that moving Rank D customers up to Rank C is more likely to be achieved by strategies that increase purchase frequency rather than average order value.

Start by aggregating your store's loyal customer data. You'll likely see a clear direction for your strategy.

Leveraging Loyal Customer Data in Growth Strategies

Here we explain how to apply loyal customer data to your growth initiatives.

Learn the Patterns of Your Loyal Customers

To grow the number of loyal customers, it's essential to first deeply understand the people who are already loyal customers.

Aggregating the following types of data will reveal purchasing trends among loyal customers and which products are most likely to turn buyers into loyal customers.

• Differences in products purchased by loyal customers vs. regular customers
• Differences in purchase intervals between loyal customers and regular customers
• Differences in LTV by first-purchase product

The following is an example from a fictional store — a chart showing LTV by first-purchase product, aggregated using the StoreHero growth platform. Since LTV grows the longer a customer has been with you, the data is broken down by the month of first purchase.

From this chart, we can see that for skirts and dresses, the gap in LTV between customers who made their first purchase in May 2022 and those who did so in November 2023 is smaller than it is for pants and tops.

This may indicate that CRM efforts targeting skirt and dress buyers have been improving in recent months, or alternatively, that customers who initially purchase skirts or dresses tend not to grow their LTV as much over time.

By aggregating LTV from Shopify order and customer data and understanding purchasing patterns like this, a clear direction for action starts to emerge.

Leveraging Loyal Customer Data in Automated CRM Emails

If you can also capture the following data about loyal customers, it becomes much easier to leverage in your CRM.

• The sequence of products purchased across multiple orders
• Products commonly purchased together in a single order
• Purchase intervals by product

With this data, you can determine what to recommend to customers who bought a particular product, and when to recommend it. Below is a sheet showing the actual counts and percentages of product combinations across repeat orders.

Regardless of what a customer buys first, it appears that tops are the most likely next purchase. And among customers who buy pants, there is a higher probability that their next purchases will be skirts and more pants compared to other product categories.

Trends like these can be applied directly to automated email and LINE campaigns.

It's fine to start with educated guesses, but as order and customer data accumulates, shifting to fact-based strategies will improve the effectiveness of your CRM efforts.

Deepening Your Understanding of Loyal Customers

If you can further learn what loyal customers appreciate about your products — through surveys, quizzes, reviews, and similar tools — you can sharpen the quality of your CRM content.

For example, if customers value product quality, content that highlights quality and functionality tends to perform better. If they appreciate your brand's concept and philosophy, more emotionally resonant content will be required.

For reference, both Klaviyo and Omnisend allow you to create survey forms, and the Shopify app PersonalizeHero, developed by StoreHero, enables you to run product quizzes as well (PersonalizeHero app listing page).

LTV also varies by customer attribute. The chart below shows LTV by first-purchase month for three different customer attribute segments.

As mentioned above, across all customer attribute groups, those who made their first purchase longer ago tend to have higher LTV. For example, customers who made their first purchase in November 2022 had an average LTV of ¥30,000–¥45,000 as of November 2023, while those who first purchased in October 2023 had LTVs of around ¥15,000.

The blue customer attribute group shows months where more recently registered customers actually have higher LTV than those from a year prior. This may indicate that post-first-purchase CRM efforts for this segment have improved.

By researching the attributes of your loyal customers and understanding LTV by customer segment, you gain a deeper picture of who your loyal customers are — enabling you to refine both strategies targeting existing loyal customers and new customer acquisition efforts aimed at potential loyal customers.

Setting Up Automated Emails in Klaviyo to Drive Loyal Customer Conversion

Once your CRM scenarios and content are defined, you'll configure them in your CRM app. In Klaviyo, automated emails based on purchased products are set up using a feature called Flows.

When configuring a Flow, you can filter the trigger by purchased product, allowing you to create separate automated email sequences for different products. You can also branch the scenario within a single Flow based on which product was purchased.

Email send timing can also be configured. Using these features, you can recommend the right next product at the right time.

Similar configurations should be possible with other CRM apps like Omnisend. If you're using a CRM app, we encourage you to give it a try.

When sending differentiated automated emails by product, monitor performance at the email level and iterate as needed. Set UTM parameters per email so you can easily track performance.

In Klaviyo, enabling UTM tracking will automatically append UTM parameters to all links in your emails.

By default, UTM parameters are appended according to the following rules, but they can be customized as needed.

Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are another important strategy for cultivating loyal customers. Once you've been operating for a while and have a clear understanding of your loyal customers' purchasing behavior, design a loyalty program to accelerate loyal customer conversion.

Loyalty programs can offer incentives in many forms beyond point-based discounts — such as early access sales exclusive to top-tier members, invitations to secret events, and rewards redemption.

The Shopify loyalty program app VIP offers features including point rewards, membership tier management, rewards (prize redemption), and referral programs. By integrating with Shopify POS or Smaregi, you can also unify points across your physical and online stores.

By managing tiers and points with VIP, you can use the StoreHero growth platform to visualize sales by tier, products purchased by tier, point redemption trends, and the impact of tiers and points on LTV.

Combining in-store and online usage data dramatically expands the range of actionable strategies. Shopify is truly impressive in how it enables all the capabilities needed for cross-channel loyal customer initiatives — simply by combining apps.

Executing CRM Operations Thoroughly with StoreHero

StoreHero supports merchants on Shopify who are looking to increase sales through thorough execution of growth strategies.

For CRM initiatives as well, we leverage the StoreHero growth platform to deliver detailed, data-driven execution that manual operations simply cannot match — including personalized product recommendations and offers via email, LINE, and customer account pages, using customer purchase history, attribute data, and product/SKU performance and inventory data. This enables continuous business growth through high-volume strategy execution.

We are currently offering free store diagnostics. If you have challenges with CRM or growth strategies in general, please get in touch. Learn more about our free store diagnostic here

Summary

We covered the importance of loyal customers and how to leverage loyal customer data in your CRM.

Above all, it's critical to have a concrete understanding of the state of your loyal customers. Start by getting a clear picture of how many loyal customers you have, how much they spend, and which products are most popular among them.

Once you understand your loyal customer profile from the data, you can apply those insights across automated CRM emails, editorial campaigns, advertising, and more — helping improve the performance of your overall growth strategy.

We hope this serves as a helpful reference.