Customer Segmentation using RFM Analysis

How well do you know your customers? Whether you operate in a B2B or B2C space, chances are that 80% of your business comes from just 20% of your customers (Pareto's Principle). According to a study by Forbes, acquiring new customers costs five times more than retaining the existing ones. Identifying high-value customers is crucial to increase revenue and building brand loyalty.

Customer Segmentation is a critical strategy for businesses to understand and engage with customers effectively. Understanding the behavioral patterns of customers can help personalize the purchases they make and cater to their needs better. 

Questions like who are the customers who contribute more to sales, who are the customers about to churn, will help digital marketers understand the behavioral patterns of their customers. 

While there are many criteria based on which the customer base can be segmented, this solution focuses on segmenting customers based on the RFM analysis.

What is RFM Analysis?

RFM analysis (Recency, Frequency and Monetary) is a method used to identify and segment existing customers based on their purchasing behavior.  The key metrics of RFM analysis include

Recency

Recency refers to how recently a customer has made their purchase and this is the most important metric of the other metrics. This metric is a strong indicator of customer loyalty and interest.

Frequency

Frequency refers to how often a customer makes purchases or interacts with a business within a specific period. It measures the level of engagement and loyalty of a customer.

Monetary

Monetary value refers to the total amount of money a customer has spent with a business during a specific period. 

Industry-Specific Applications of RFM Analysis

• SaaS and subscription services: RFM analysis can be adapted for SaaS and subscription services to segment users based on engagement, renewals, and revenue contribution.
  
• Financial Sector: RFM analysis can improve credit scoring and risk assessment by evaluating customer transaction patterns, helping financial institutions make more informed loan approval decisions.
  

Data Requirements

For RFM analysis, you'll need a transactional dataset with the following equivalent columns (details) 

• A product (Product ID)
  
• A related transaction (Transaction ID)
  
• Number of products purchased in a transaction (Product Quantity)
  
• The product purchase price (Product Price)
  
• Transaction date (Date)
  
• Customer who made the purchase (Customer ID, Customer Name)
  

We have used a sample table of e-commerce data for illustration.

Steps for Implementing RFM analysis

1. Gather and Prepare Transaction Data : 

Gather all transaction data, ensuring it includes customer identifiers, transaction dates, and monetary amounts, and address missing or inconsistent values, ensuring data integrity before analysis.

2. Compute RFM Metrics: 

To segment customers based on their behavior, we compute three key metrics: Recency (R), Frequency (F), and Monetary Value (M). Below are SQL queries for each, along with detailed explanations.

Recency (R)

Recency measures how recently a customer made a purchase. It is calculated as the number of days since their last transaction. Customers with recent purchases are more engaged, while those who haven’t bought in a long time may be at risk of churn.

The time frame for RFM analysis should be tailored to your business model and industry. Choosing the right period for RFM analysis is essential, as it directly influences the accuracy of customer segmentation and the quality of insights derived.

Frequency (F)

Frequency tracks how often a customer makes purchases within a specific period. A higher frequency indicates a loyal customer who regularly shops, while a lower frequency suggests occasional or one-time buyers.

Monetary Value (M)

The total amount spent by the customer in the same period

RFM Query Table

SELECT "Customer ID", "Customer Name", DAYS_BETWEEN(MAX("Transaction Date"), CURRENT_DATE()) AS "Recency", COUNT ("Order ID") AS "Frequency", SUM("Transaction Amount") AS "Monetary Value" FROM  "Customer Data"  GROUP BY "Customer ID",   "Customer Name"  ORDER BY "Recency" ASC,   "Frequency" DESC, "Monetary Value" DESC

3. Segment Customers using Cluster Analysis

Manual scoring can skew the results and may not be practical for handling large volumes of data. In contrast, using machine learning algorithms like cluster analysis ensures unbiased, efficient, and data-driven segmentation. Unlike traditional scoring methods such as the quantile or percentile-based approach, cluster analysis recognizes inherent relationships and patterns in the data. With cluster analysis, business can obtain accurate segmentation and devise targeted strategies to improve sales and customer retention.

Follow the below steps to apply cluster analysis,

1. Click the Create New icon and choose New chart from the drop-down menu.
   
2. Add the columns to the chart shelf as shown below,
   
1. X-axis: Customer Name
   
2. Y-axis: Monetary Value with Sum function.
   
3. Click Generate Graph and change the chart type to bar chart.
   
   
4. Click the Analysis icon and select Cluster Analysis > Add Clusters.
   
5. The Model is chosen automatically based on the columns dropped in the shelves.
   
6. By default, the columns dropped in the shelves (Monetary Value) are selected as factors. Click the drop-down icon to include Recency and Frequency columns as factors.
   
   
7. The number of clusters is determined automatically but can be adjusted based on business needs and specific customer segmentation goals to ensure optimal categorization.
   
8. Choose the Normalization method to prevent values of high ranges from dominating the results. For instance, Recency (measured in days) and Monetary Value (measured in currency) have different scales, and normalization ensures a balanced contribution from each metric.
9. Click Apply.
   
   

4. Export Clusters Data

Once the customer profiles have been segmented using cluster analysis, Export the Current view in the preferred table format to build more data visualizations to understand the clusters.

Build an RFM Analysis Dashboard

The RFM analysis dashboard provides a comprehensive view of customer behavior. Let's look at the steps involved in building this dashboard.

1. Import the Clusters Data

Import the downloaded clusters table back into Zoho Analytics using the files option as given below.

1. Click the New icon on the side navigation panel and choose New Table/ Import Data.
   
2. Select files and choose the Clusters Table to import and click Next.
   
3. A data preview will be displayed; verify the data types of columns and click Create.
   

2. Create Reports to Understand the Characteristics of the Clusters

While the data is clustered, understanding the characteristics of each cluster is what enables businesses to take strategic actions. This includes identifying which customers need targeted marketing, personalized engagement, or retention efforts. Recognizing patterns within clusters provides insights into customer behavior, which is essential for optimizing marketing campaigns, improving retention strategies, and enhancing customer experience.

The below reports help understand the distribution of customers across different monetary value, recency and frequency segments within each cluster.

Clusters vs Monetary Value 

1. Access the cluster table (imported data) and click the new icon > chart view.
   
2. Drag and drop the columns as given below:
   
1. X-axis - Clusters
   
2. Y-axis - Monetary Value with the Count function.
   
3. Color - Monetary Value with the Actual Range function.
   
   

Analyzing the chart, we can infer that,

• Cluster 1 consists of a diverse group of customers spanning all spending levels.
  
• Cluster 2 includes moderate to high spenders who contribute significantly to revenue.
  
• Cluster 3 comprises low to mid-range spenders, often occasional buyers.
  
• Cluster 4 represents high-value customers with premium spending habits.
  
• Cluster 5 consists primarily of low spenders with minimal purchasing activity.
  

You can similarly create reports to know about the distribution of customers for the Recency and Frequency metrics.

The below table lists the characteristics of clusters

Cluster	Cluster Classification	Recency	Frequency	Monetary	Recommended actions
Cluster 1	Needs Attention	100 to 150 days	Low to Moderate	Diverse spending	Re-engagement campaigns, discounts, or reminders to encourage repeat purchases.
Cluster 2	Loyalist	0-50 (Highly Active)	High	Consistent moderate-to-high spenders	Loyalty programs, exclusive deals, early access to new products to maintain engagement.
Cluster 3	Potential Loyalist	0-50 (Active)	Low to Moderate	Budget-conscious, occasional buyers	Cross-selling, personalized recommendations, and value-based promotions.
Cluster 4	Champions	100-150 (Inactive)	Moderate to High (Frequent buyers)	High spenders	VIP experiences, personalized services, and premium offers to retain and enhance their spending.
Cluster 5	Hibernating	Mostly inactive or infrequent	Low	Minimal spending	Win-back campaigns, incentives, special discounts, and targeted ads to regain interest.

Based on the above table, you can give specific labels to the clusters using the bucket columns option.

RFM Dashboard

Limitations & Considerations of RFM Analysis

While RFM analysis is a powerful customer segmentation tool, businesses should be aware of certain limitations and factors that can influence results:

• Data Freshness and Relevance: RFM analysis relies on transactional data, making the freshness and relevance of this data crucial for accurate customer segmentation. Setting up automated data imports ensures real-time updates, reducing the risk of working with stale data.
  
• Seasonal Variations: Customer purchasing behavior often fluctuates due to seasonal trends, holidays, and industry-specific cycles, which can impact RFM scores and lead to misleading segmentation if not accounted for properly. Instead of analyzing only recent months, compare customer behavior for the same period in previous years to detect true engagement patterns.

• Topic Participants

• Nisha Angel J

  

• Hammer Group

• Juan

• Sticky Posts

• What's New in Zoho Analytics - October 2025

  Hello Users! We're are back with a fresh set of updates and enhancements to make data analysis faster and more insightful. Take a quick look at what’s new and see how these updates can power up your reports and dashboards. Explore What's New! Extreme

• What’s New in Zoho Analytics – September 2025

  Hello Users!! In this month’s update, we’re raising the bar across multiple touchpoints, from how you bring in data, plan and track projects to how you design and brand your dashboards. We’ve added the all-new Gantt chart for project visualization, expanded

• Announcing Agentic AI - Ask Zia!

  We are delighted to roll out the new agentic AI capabilities in Ask Zia, where every stage of the BI workflow is assisted by AI. With a human-in-the-loop approach, Ask Zia ensures that you’re in command of the decision, while AI handles the complexity.

• Invitation-Based User Access in Zoho Analytics

  Hello everyone, We’re rolling out an important update on how users are added to your Zoho Analytics Organization and Workspaces. Previously, when admins added users, they were automatically added to the organization. Moving forward, to improve security

• Zoholics Europe 2025: Your Ultimate Data Analysis (Zoho Analytics) Workshop Experience

  Why should you attend? This year, Zoholics Europe 2025 is putting data analysis centre stage. With a dedicated workshop designed to answer all your data-related questions, you’ll gain practical skills, real-time solutions, and expert insights that you

• Recent Topics

• Duplicating and referencing datasets

  I am moving from PowerBI to Zoho Analytics and while I find Zoho easier to use in many ways, there is one function that I use in PowerBI that I have not been able to find in Zoho.   I have several data sets that I need to modify in different ways to get

• How we cut CRM updates from ~20 minutes down to 2, our real workflow

  Updating the Zoho CRM after every call used to be one of the biggest time sucks for our team. By the time you write your notes, clean them up, fill in the fields, and log everything properly… you’ve easily lost 15–20 minutes per call. We started experimenting

• Add home page or dashboard in CRM customer portal

  is it possible to add home page or dashboard in CRM customer portal?

• User Tips: How to change the the label display name of a system defined field

  Most users know how to change field label names via Settings > Modules & Fields but if you want to change the name of a system defined field you can’t as there is no “edit properties” option.  However with a simple hack you can edit any system defined

• Search not working!

  I have items in my notebook tagged but when I search for a tag nothing comes up! Any fix for this?

• Zoho Analytics Regex Support

  When can we expect full regex support in Zoho Analytics SQL such as REGEXP_REPLACE? Sometimes I need to clean the data and using regex functions is the easiest way to achieve this.

• Zoho CRM Community Digest - October 2025 | Part 1

  Hello Everyone! Here's a quick recap of first two weeks of October! Product Updates: Zoho CRM Android App Update: Surveys, Blueprints, and Smarter Mobile Features! Zoho CRM’s Android app just got a useful upgrade. You can now share records, upload your

• Add Custom Field Inside Parts Section

  How to Add Custom Field Inside Parts Section in Workorder like Category and Sub- Category

• What is New in CRM Functions?

  What is New in CRM Functions? Hello everyone! We're delighted to share that Functions in Zoho CRM have had a few upgrades that would happen in phases. Phase 1 An all new built-in editor for better user experience and ease of use. ETA: In a couple of days.

• Automate onboarding emails with CRM Workflow and Accounts module

  We’re a B2B SaaS company selling to public-sector organisations. Each organisation is stored as an Account in Zoho CRM, and each organisation typically has multiple associated Contacts. Our backend syncs product-usage data (setup status, user activity,

• Using a CRM Client Script Button to create a Books Invoice

  Hello, I need help handling error messages returned to my client script from a function. The scenario I have setup a client script button which is available from each Deal. This CS executes a crm function, which in turn creates an invoice based on the

• Important update: Enhanced security measures for account operations in Zoho Cliq

  Greetings from the Zoho Cliq team! We’d like to share an important security update that has an influence on some admin actions such as password reset, MFA reset, and MFA backup code generation. What’s changing? With our latest security enhancements, these

• Read webpage - MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP

  I have the following VBA script, put together from various sources (mainly zoho forum/help/support, so it once worked, I guess): private Sub GetListOfSheets() Dim url As String Dim xmlhttp As Object Dim parameters As String Dim html As String range("B1").value

• Sales Receipts Duplicating when I run reports why and how do we rectify this and any other report if this happens

  find attached extract of my report

• Can I execute two 'functions' when completing a mail merge from CRM?

  Hi, I have set up a mail merge from CRM Deals to a template. I want a copy of this to be saved in Workdrive, and then a copy also saved back into the deal record from which the merge occurred. I can do both independent of each other, and managed to get

• No Functional Autosave or Manual Save Button

  Application : Zoho Notebook So I wanted to try Zoho Notebook(On Ubuntu) as an application, I installed the application and went solving my LeetCode problems visually(Drawing mode), at one point the app just stopped saving anything... Every time I tried

• Enterprise subscription support

  My organization sells subscription services to enterprise customers, which is a different model from the consumer subscription model that Zoho Billing has been designed to support and I beleve this capability should be added. An enterprise subscription

• Issue with Creator's IF logic

  Hi, I found the following code produces unexpected results: if(-1.0 < 0.0000000) {       info "True"; } else {       info "False"; } if(-1.0 < 0.000000) {       info "True"; } else {       info "False"; } The output returned is: False True However, the

• Need option to send Package PDF in shipment email (Shipment PDF is missing Lot info)

  Is there any way to automatically attach the Package PDF instead of (or alongside) the Shipment PDF in the notification emails? We really need this feature because the default Shipment PDF creates a blind spot for our customers. It does not display Batch/Lot

• zoho creator view is not present in the workspace and blank reports

  Hi Support,  Users who have "write" permissions keep getting this error for all of our embedded reports all of a sudden. See screen shot below: Meanwhile, my developer permissions account sees a blank screen in view and edit mode as shown in the screenshots

• Customize portal email template

  Can i fetch only first name of the user in portal email template instead of the below code Hi ${User.FULL_NAME}

• Can't we let users decide which options they'd like to add at embed widget?

  It seems embed widget DOES NOT offer a feature, where users can choose options upon subscribing plans. What Zoho has instead, is that admins have to manually create plan with options. How come no one in Zoho dev team never raised issue about usability

• Reupload and rename from one field to another field (file upload)

  Hi Everyone, Sorry, i have question to use invoke url for rename and reupload attachments file to another field. Tested on development mode. Zoho C6. Refer to https://www.zoho.com/creator/help/api/v2/upload-file.html look my error notification. Does anyone

• Printing Multi-Page Reports (PDF Export)

  Hi, I am moving a report from Google's Looker Studio to Zoho Analytics and trying to reproduce the Looker page by page dashboard editing experience. With Google, what you see is what you get when you print to PDF. But I can't seem to create the same experience

• Resume Harvester: New Enhancements for Faster Sourcing

  We’re excited to share a set of enhancements to Resume Harvester that make sourcing faster and more flexible. These updates help you cut down on repetitive steps, manage auto searches more efficiently, and review candidate profiles with ease. Why we built

• I NEED TO NUMBER TO TEXT NO HERE

  =NUMBERTEXT NEEED

• Error: View is not present in the workspace

  When saving a dashboard, user receives a popup with the following error. "View is not present in the workspace" What does this mean or refer to? There is no further insight given.

• Dear Zoho CEO: Business Growth is about how you prioritise!

  All of us in business know that when you get your priorities right, your business grows. Zoho CRM and Zoho Books are excellent products, but sadly, Zoho Inventory continues to lag behind. Just this morning, I received yet another one-sided email about

• Is there any way to send an Excel received by email to Dataprep?

  Every day I receive an email alert with an Excel file that I want to process through a Dataprep pipeline. To do this, I need to: -Save the file to disk -Open the pipeline -Run the pipeline -Update the source -Several clicks to select and open the saved

• Bin Locations

  Dear all, I am wondering if someone has the ability to develop the bin locations option for zoho inventory (integrated with zoho books) Regards, Ryan

• Create and populate a record in an instant: Introducing zero-shot field prompting to Zia's ICR

  A couple of months ago, we upgraded our in-house AI image detection and validation tool, Zia Vision, with intelligent character recognition (ICR). By training Zia with sample images, you could create and enrich CRM records with data extracted from standard

• How to Prevent Users From Skipping LMS Videos in Zoho People

  How to Prevent Users From Skipping LMS Videos in Zoho People Hello Zoho Developers, In this blog, we will quickly look at how you can stop users from skipping or fast-forwarding videos in Zoho People LMS. Zoho People provides a feature called Disable

• Sent mail sort by date disappeared

  Hello, We used to be able to sort the emails by date in the sent folder, but this feature has recently disappeared. Can we bring it back?

• [Integration Edition] Deluge Learning Series – Custom API with Deluge | November 2025

  We’re excited to conclude this four-month Integration Edition of the Deluge Learning Series: Session 1 – Integrating Zoho Apps with Deluge Using Built-In Integration Tasks Session 2 – Integrating Zoho Apps with Deluge Using invokeURL and invokeAPI Session

• Automate Backups

  This is a feature request. Consider adding an auto backup feature. Where when you turn it on, it will auto backup on the 15-day schedule. For additional consideration, allow for the export of module data via API calls. Thank you for your consideration.

• Tips for Organizing Workflows and Improving Team Coordination in Zoho

  Hi everyone, I’m looking for some general advice on how different teams are organizing their daily work within Zoho’s apps. Our team recently expanded, and we’re trying to streamline how tasks, discussions, and documents are shared so everything stays

• Prevent user from viewing all records?

  I have a report that is meant to be used by vendors to view only the records that are assigned to them. All the vendor information is stored in a separate application, so I need to call a function to get the current user's ID (not the zoho user ID). The report settings criteria doesn't support using function calls, so instead I'm embedding the report in an html page like this: if (thisapp.Global.CurrentUserIs("Vendor")) {       personID = common.getLoggedInPersonID();       query = "Assigned_Vendor.ID="

• Series Label in the Legend

  My legend reads 'Series 1' and 'Series 2'. From everything I read online, Zoho is supposed to change the data names if it's formatted correctly. I have the proper labels on the top of the columns and the right range selected. I assume it's something in

• Zoho Site pages not displaying in iframes

  I simply want to show a Zoho Site page inside an iframe on another non Zoho website. When testing this across many browsers, the iframe content simply does not appear. IE reports that the host does not allow their content to be displayed in iframes. Very disappointing. Is there a way around this please? Here is the URL of the page I would like to appear in an iframe. http://ips-properties-to-rent.zohosites.com

• Zoho Inventory as connector in Zoho Creator

  Hello, It doesn't appear that Zoho Inventory is one of the many built in connectors in Zoho Creator? I see that there are non-Zoho inventory applications that have built in connectors such as Cin7, which leads me to believe that I'm missing something

• Next Page