We all know customers differ from one another in their needs, wants, and buying behaviors. Therefore, personalization becomes an essential component in creating & developing customer satisfaction in their shopping experience. To achieve this, it is important to segment customers into groups for corresponding marketing campaigns that can engage and retain the right customer at the right time.
What is a customer segment?
Segmenting customers is critical to any successful business. With Atom8, there are 2 ways to segment your customers, which are
- Assigning Customer to a group allows merchants to easily allocate customers, who share characteristics & behaviors in common, to specific groups.
- Adding custom attributes to a customer allows you to multi-tag a customer with different custom attributes that you can create on Atom8. This directly solves the nature of BigCommerce’s problem in terms of customer grouping in which one customer can only be added to one group.
Let’s have a quick example, say you want to assign a customer whose lifetime spending has just exceeded $5000 to your “VIP member” list and offer them a big discount for the next purchase. Below is a workflow of how Atom8 executes:
WHEN: An order is placed
IF: Customer lifetime spending is greater than $5000
THEN: Add the customer to group “VIP member”
AND: Send a thank-you & follow-up emails to this customer with a custom discount code
Why care about segments?
Creating a segment will save you tons of time on customer relationship management. By auto-grouping and auto-adding custom attributes, customers can be allocated into subcategories for further treatments.
For example, here’s the case study of Sunglass LA on how they saved 30 hours weekly on customer segmentation.
Over the week of Black Friday’s big sales campaign, Sunglass LA had their eyes set on multiple discount programs for each group of customers based on their total lifetime spending. This required the team to execute quite a few challenging and arduous tasks, including:
- Reorganising and grouping each order that a customer had ever purchased in the store, and then calculating the total lifetime spending for each customer.
- Segmenting the customer base into three main groups based on their total spending: Platinum (> $5000) – Gold (> $2000 and < $5000) – Silver (< $2000)
- Applying different discount percentages (30% – 50% – 70%) for multiple product categories
The Solution from Atom8
Automatically accumulate all orders purchased, then calculate the total lifetime spending for each customer. Auto-tag customers with different attributes based on the total lifetime spending: Platinum (> $5000) – Gold (> $2000 and < $5000) – Silver (< $2000) and send emails to each group with different discount rates accordingly.
“We truly had a painful time of manually executing all the tedious and repetitive tasks over and over again” says Viet Tran – CEO SunglassLA.
“Atom8 really provides the automation solution that allows us to spend less and still assures the business growth.”
How to create a segment
Before jumping into how-to step by step, it is important to dig deeper into what Atom8 can offer in terms of customer segmentation:
- Geographic: Country, State, and Zip code.
For example, when a customer is created, if the customer’s state equals Texas, then add attribute “Texas customer”. Segmentation based on geographic criteria allows you to easily arrange shipment and optimize distribution channels, etc.
- Demographics: name, email domain, company, gender, age, marital status, income, etc.
You can apply discounts for employees from a company or customer in a certain age range.
- Behavior: order amount, product purchased, lifetime value or account created date, etc.
For instance, by assigning iPhone buyers to “Apple group”, you can increase the chance of up-selling with an Airpods offer sent directly to this customer by Atom8.
- Custom attributes: mixed groups or different categories
For example, you can combine customer lifetime value, and the account created date into a segment to target new customers with high spending in your store. Through Atom8, you can engage with this segment by automatic promotions or loyalty programs.
3 simple steps
- Trigger: You will need to start your workflow with a trigger i.e. when an order is placed or a customer creates an account.
- Condition: Based on the nature of your business, the condition will vary, i.e if the number of items ordered is less than/ equal to/ greater than 100 units. In this step, you will need to specify the criteria (demographic, geographic or behavior)
- Action: i.e. assign customers to a specific group, add custom attributes to the customer or send automated emails to customers for discounts or up-selling products, etc.
And that’s all there is to it! With Atom8’s Advanced Segmentation, you can target your customers precisely and send them exactly what they want, saving time for more important tasks. That means better experiences for them, better operations for your team, and a better ROI for your business!
