How to Create and Manage Customer Segments in Shopify

Jairene Cruz-Eusebio on Aug 18, 2021 3:30:34 PM

In today’s customer-centric world, customer segmentation is a crucial aspect of customer relationship management. If you don’t have customer segments, then how will you know what your customers’ needs are?

Segmentation allows marketers to tailor their messages and products to the customer. These segments help businesses better understand their customers and what they need so that they can improve relationships with them over time.

If you are looking to improve your customers’ response to your marketing campaign, you’ve come to the right place. This article will go over customer segmentation in Shopify, types of customer segments, and how to set up customer segments in your store.

Understanding Your Audience: What Exactly are Customer Segments and How to Create and Manage Them in Shopify?

Customer segments are a way to classify customers and their needs into different groups. This allows you to provide them with customized marketing messages, products, or promotions based on the group they belong in. The marketing messages are tailored to suit particular segments, thereby making it easy to establish a good customer relationship.

Boosting Your Business: Why You Should Segment Your Customers and How to Create and Manage These Segments in Shopify?

Why should you bother creating customer segments in your store when there’s already so many other things for entrepreneurs to do? There are a number of reasons:

1. Create Targeted Messages based on Demographics

Segmenting your customers not only makes it easier to send targeted messages but also very accurately identify distinct groups of customers based on important factors related to their behavior, demographics, location and other indicators. With segmentation, businesses can easily gather a vast amount of data on customers making it significantly easier to address each customer in the most effective way possible.

2. Determine the Best Marketing Strategy per Segment

With customer segments, you can easily determine the best ways to market to your customers whether by email, social media, SMS, or other marketing methods. When communication is done in a way that’s most suitable to your customers, your customers will be more willing to engage with your business and you can then discover new ways to make your product better.

3. Find the Highest Revenue-Generating Group

Dividing your customers into different segments makes it easier to identify your most profitable customers and ensure they remain with your company through sending gifts, deals, and loyalty programs.

4. For Better Customer Management

Another benefit of segmenting customers on Shopify is the ease you get in managing your customers. Even on your Shopify App on your phone, it becomes pretty straightforward to find the customers you’re looking for.

Also, by grouping your customers based on their purchase history, you can promote products that are “next in line” and avoid promoting products or services that your customer has already purchased.

Customer Filter Options in Shopify

In marketing, customer segmentation is often focused on two major areas – demographics and psychographics. These two areas are both important in acquiring very useful information about customers and are often used together for very precise segmentation.

To learn more about the concept of psychographic and demographic segmentation, read our article on Customer Segmentation for eCommerce.

On Shopify, you can create segments on Shopify based on filters you set in the Customer tab.

These are the available filters:

• Email subscription status

This option is pretty self-explanatory. There are three options to choose from, namely, Subscribed, Pending Confirmation, and Not Susbcribed.

Shopify, by default, requires Double-Opt In, which is a two-stop process. First, the user needs to input his email. Second, he needs to visit his email and click on the confirm button to be subscribed.

• Tagged with

Tags are used on Shopify to categorize and organize your customers’ search results. The customer tags are added to the customers’ detail page and are used to group related customers. This is what you’ll be using to create your segments.

One customer could have multiple tags and could appear in multiple groupings. For instance, a customer could be tagged as an email marketing subscriber and a US shopper. So when you filter and create groups based on email marketing and location in the US, the customer will appear in both segments.

• Customer Account Status

Every time a customer buys from your online shop, he or she will be asked to create an account. You may require your customer to create an account, or you can make account creation optional so as to prevent cart abandonment.

There are currently four account statuses available, as can be seen from the image below:

• Customer Language

If you cater to international clients, chances are you’ll have customers that use different browser languages. You can therefore select your customers based on the language they used on your store.

• Amount spent

Shopify allows you to filter customers based on the amount of money they’ve spent on your store. This can help you know and market to your highest, average, or lowest spenders in different ways appropriate to their segment to encourage them to spend more.

• Number of orders

This filter option lets you filter customers according to the number of orders they have made. You can use this to determine loyalty rewards for customers based on how many times they’ve bought from you.

• Date of Order

With this grouping option, you can determine who placed an order in your store within a specific date range.

• Date added as Customer

Some of your customers have been with you since the beginning; some have ordered from you fairly recently. If you have a specific promotion for clients based on how long they’ve been purchasing from you, then you can use this filter.

• Abandonded an order

It’s quite common for Shopify store owners to face the issues of customers abandoning their carts at checkout. This option lets you identify customers who abandoned an order, along with the date of the abandonment. With this information, you could take steps to recover customers.

• Location

With this filtering option, you can easily group customers based on where they are located according to country.

• New and Returning

This is a filter that appears at the top of the customers’ list. Clicking on New shows you the newest customers on your store, which are basically just customers who have not purchased anything.

Returning customers are those who have ordered more than one time.

• Keyword Filter

If what you need does not fall under any available options, then you can use the keyword filter. You can enter almost anything in the keyword filter and if it matches any of the customer’s information, such as name, address, or phone number, then that customer will be displayed.

How to Create Shopify Customer Segments

Now that you know how to filter out customers, it’s easier to create customer segments.

Creating customer groups basically entails filtering particular customers you wish to make into a segment, and then saving the results or adding tags. The steps you can take are as follows:

Step 1: Filter or Search Your Desired Customer List

The first thing to do is to search for the customers you wish to add to a group. You can do this by clicking ‘Filters’ on your Customers page and selecting a filtering option.

For instance, to filter by customers located in Canada, all you have to do is click on ‘located in’ from the drop-down menu and select Canada as the country of your choice.

Step 2: Save the List

After getting your list of customers, click on ‘Save Filters’ on the right of the search bar. Then give the filter result a name to avoid losing it. After typing in the name, click on ‘Save’ and a new filter tab containing your saved list will appear. This allows you to easily access your created group anytime you want.

Every time you make a search and save it, you can either save it as a new group or update an existing saved search by clicking on “overwrite an existing saved search.”

You can also save this list by adding a Tag to all the results. Just select all the results, click on the “More Actions” dropdown, then choose “Add Tags”. You can then filter results in the future by selecting the Tag you created.

It’s important to note that the customer groups you create are updated automatically as customers are added or deleted. This will depend on the filters you use to create the groups.

Editing Customer Groups

• Manually adding customers to groups

Although you can’t manually add customers to a group, you can add tags to customers and create segments with those tags.

• Removing a customer from a group

If you’d like to remove a customer from a segment, all you have to do is visit the customer’s profile in your Shopify dashboard and remove the tag that associates them with a certain group.

If you want to remove multiple customers, click on the checkbox next to their names, click on the “More Options” dropdown, then choose “Remove Tags”.

• Remove Filter Tab or Change Filter Name

If you think a specific filter is of not much use to you and you want to remove it from your Customer tabs, you must first click on the filter. Then on the rightmost portion of the menu, click on the “Saved” button.

An option to Remove the Tab will appear.

You can use the same options to change the filter’s name.

Using Customer Segments for Marketing

Once you have properly segmented and tagged your customers, you can start marketing to individual groups. There are two ways to do this in Shopify, and that is via:

1. Discounts and Marketing Sections in Shopify

One of the easiest ways to market to your customers is to provide them with discounts. This helps both with new customers and returning ones. Once you have created your customer groups, you can subsequently create special discount codes or automatic discounts that can be assigned to specific segments.

The Marketing section in Shopify is fairly new (though the tools have always been there in the past). While they feature third-party apps, they mainly focus on in-house marketing tools such as Shopify Email and Google Shopping.

2. Shopify Marketing Apps

Almost all Shopify marketing apps are reliant on your customer segmentation to properly create marketing campaigns.

For instance, you can set up cart recovery SMS messages via WinBack to get customers who left to come back and complete the purchase. This strategy will only be effective if you send the message to a customer who left without buying, not to someone who actually completed the purchase, right?

To do so, you can set this campaign to send to customers who abandoned their carts, which is a specific customer segment.

Another example would be sending a promotional message to someone who lives in New York, for example. You can create a segment and tag of New Yorkers in Shopify’s Customers section, then go to WinBack and create a free shipping offer sent only to New Yorkers.

The same goes with all your marketing campaigns, whether it be email marketing, social media ads, Google ads, Snapchat ads, and more.

How to Know Which Customer Segments to Focus On

Different segments usually require different customizations, which is why it can also be difficult to market to multiple segments all at the same time.

Imagine having to invest your time creating numerous personalized marketing messages and marketing channels, and then tracking various campaign results. You might go crazy, especially if you’re the only one managing your online store and your physical store!

As such, it’s advisable to only make a few segments a priority, at least initially. But then, which segments should you prioritize above others?

The Scale Framework

There is a framework e-commerce store owners could use to decide which segments should be tracked and marketed first. It’s known as the SCALE, and it represents Size, Currency, Access, Love, and Early Adopters.

Here’s a brief explanation of what it means:

Create and Manage Size

When creating or marketing to segments, you need to consider the size of the group. For obvious reasons, you should market to your largest segments first.

For instance, if you own a women’s clothing store, depending on your kind of products, it could mean that you have to market to women between the ages of 18 and 35 with certain likes and preferences.

Create and Manage Currency

This represents the income of the customers in the segment. It’s important to pay attention to segments that can afford to buy your products (or can afford to buy more of them).

For instance, if your Shopify store deals with men’s clothing, it wouldn’t make much sense to focus on a segment of teens who are only recent graduates without a source of income. You should rather focus on men who have a stable income.

Access

Here, access means that you should be able to easily access the market. Meaning that if a segment spends most of their time on certain places online, you should have the budget to easily reach them by marketing on those platforms.

Love

This simply describes how passionate you are about marketing to the segment. When building your store, you must have had some specific kinds of people in mind.

Do the people in this segment meet this description? When you’re passionate about a customer segment, you will find it easier to learn about the market deeply and determine the best approaches to take.

Early Adopters

Early adopters are those customers who have frequently purchased your products from the beginning. It usually shows that they care enough to purchase what you sell, and are easier to market to.

Of course, you must not use all of these all at once! These are just a few of the ways you can narrow down to which segment you want to focus on.

Start Segmenting Today!

Creating customer segments on Shopify is quite easy. If done properly, you will notice a positive difference in your marketing effectiveness, no matter the size of your business.

You can use the customer segments you create on Shopify to gain very useful insights into which of your products you should market and to whom. You can also study your customer segments to learn more about them and what they like.

If you’re looking to improve your customer’s response to marketing campaigns (and who isn’t?), you must combine customer segmentation with customized offers and effective marketing techniques, one of which is SMS marketing. Sign-up for a 14-day trial at WinBack and see your results soar!

Topics: Shopify Marketing, Customer Segments, Best Practices