A Different Use of Time Series to Identify Seasonal Customers

I had previously written about creatively leveraging your data using segmentation to learn about a customer base. The article is here. In the article I mentioned utilizing any data that might be relevant. Trying to identify customers with seasonal usage patterns was one of the variables that I mentioned that sounded interesting. And since I’m getting ready to do another cluster analysis, I decided to tackle this question.

These are my favorite types of data science problems. It requires you to think a little outside the box to design a solution. Basically, I wanted to be able to tag each customer as whether or not they exhibited a seasonal pattern, this would be a first step. Later I may further build this out to determine the beginning of each customer’s “off-season”. This will allow us to nurture these customer relationships better, and provide a more personalized experience.

I’m a data scientist at Constant Contact, we provide email marketing solutions to small businesses. Since it is a subscription product, customers have different usage patterns that I’m able to use for this analysis.

At first, my assumption was that a good portion of these customers might be living in an area that has 4 seasons. You know, the ice cream shop in New England that shuts down for the winter. After…