How to conduct cohort analysis

Overview

Cohort analysis is a powerful way to track and improve customer retention over time. By examining how cohorts, or groups of contacts, who share a common starting point like the month they subscribed or made their first purchase behave as time goes on, you can measure the long-term impact of your marketing efforts and optimize for better results.

Read on to learn how to use the report center for cohort analysis.

What is cohort analysis?

Cohort analysis groups your audience by a shared event date, such as when they signed up or first converted.

You can then measure engagement, retention, and revenue within each group to see how customers acquired at different times respond to your campaigns and automations.

How frequently should I conduct cohort analysis?

We recomment conducting a cohort analysis as part of your monthly account audit.

When you conduct a monthly cohort analysis, you can:

• Monitor retention and churn trends over time

• Evaluate the effectiveness of changes to onboarding or marketing strategy

• Identify periods with stronger or weaker performance

• Uncover opportunities for targeted follow-up or win-back campaigns

Reports to use for cohort analysis

The report center gives you access to the data you need to conduct effective cohort analysis.

At the start of each month, access the report center and gather metrics for contacts who joined in previous months.

1. Track each month's engagement and revenue in a spreadsheet or dashboard for easy comparison.

2. Look for trends or drops in performance that align with changes in your marketing activity.

3. Use these insights to refine your automations, campaign targeting, and retention strategies.

Here’s how you can use the available reports:

Contact reports

Use the email subscriber report and SMS subscriber report to evaluate the number of new subscribers unsubscribes month over month.

You can paste each month's report into a master spreadsheet with a cumulative line graph that will show you growth and contraction over time.

Campaign reports

Use the email campaign and SMS campaign reports to review the effectiveness of your campaigns for the month.

When you target specific cohorts (for example, sending a check-in or win-back campaign to contacts who recently subscribed), campaign reports let you see how each group responds.

Compare open rates, click rates, and conversion rates for campaigns sent to different monthly cohorts to identify which groups are most engaged or likely to convert.

Automation reports

Use the email automation and SMS automation reports to review engagement and conversion metrics for automations, specifically your core automations like welcome series, abandoned browse or checkout, and post-purchase.

Automations often contain the first communication new subscribers or customers receive from your brand. Monitoring performance at the cohort level (for example, comparing welcome series completion and conversion rates for subscribers who joined in January vs. February) helps you measure the impact of changes in messaging, timing, or offers.

Revenue Report

Use the revenue report to evaluate revenue generated from email campaigns and automations, broken down by date.

Review the overview of revenue collection on each day of the month for email and SMS in campaigns and automations, and store this data in a master spreadsheet each month to see changes over time.