As the number of eCommerce stores continues to grow, customers have an ever-increasing number of places to shop and products to buy. Standing apart from the crowd and delivering a great shopping experience online is a challenge that every merchant in any industry faces. Customers want products that are tailored to their needs, tastes, and budget, and they don’t want to spend time looking for them. Nearly 80% of consumers say they want and expect personalized shopping experiences. In fact, more than half of millennials expect a brand to remember their birthday.
Fortunately, both versions 1 and 2 of Magento Enterprise Edition come with out-of-the-box features that make personalization easy. One of the most powerful of these Enterprise Edition-exclusive features is customer segmentation. Using these advanced segmentation tools, retailers can identify their most valuable customers, group customers using a wide range of variables, and deliver customized shopping and marketing elements.
Segment Attributes
There are a variety of attributes that can be used to build custom segments. You can also apply date ranges to these attributes. For example, you can create a segment that includes customers who are between the ages of 25 and 50, live in the US, and have made a purchase in the last six months. Below is a list of the available customer attributes:
Customer Address
- First Name
- Last Name
- Street Address
- City
- State
- Zip code
- Country
Customer information
- Date of birth
- Store Credit
- Newsletter subscription status
- Customer group
Cart
- Shopping cart total
- Cart line items
- Cart quantity
- Cart value
Products
- Products in shopping cart
- Products on wish list
- Previously viewed products
- Previously ordered products
Orders
- Total number of orders
- Total value of orders
- Average number of orders
- Average value of orders
- Order status
These segments allow you to look at your customer database with a new level of granularity and the possibilities for making segments are endless. Merchants can create segments for different generations, for discounted shipping and delivery for customers who live within a certain distance of a physical store or warehouse, for customers whose birthday falls in a given month, for those who have items on their wishlist but haven’t made a purchase yet. Segmentation can be used to help you identify the lifetime value of a customer or to identify your best customers. These segments are automatically updated in real time, so you don’t have to worry that your list has become outdated.
Segmentation and Marketing
These lists are nice to have, but how do you use them? Once you have built a segment, you can create a cart price rule or coupon code for any customer segment that you have selected. This could be a special discount for a customer’s birthday, a sale to reward customers who spent $200 or more, or a coupon as a thank you to everyone who signed up for a newsletter. You can design a banner that will display on your site to your chosen segment. You could use a different homepage banner image based on where the customer lives, to advertise the new cart rule discount you have created, and more. Merchants can also use segmented lists to create targeted email campaigns and relevant promotions.
The team at ParadoxLabs is adept at using these segmentation tools to enhance marketing strategies. We can create custom segments to paint a picture of a store’s primary customer types, then use this information to formulate distinct customer personas. These personas include specific details about customers and are used across a variety of marketing tactics to ensure that you are sending the right message to the right customer at the right time.
Another way we use segmentation for our clients is by creating promotional or automated email campaigns. ParadoxLabs designs custom emails to specifically target customers based on segmentation. For example, we can do an email with a coupon code that is sent shortly before a customer’s birthday. Other possibilities include a special thank you or rewards email for customers who have spent a certain amount, an abandoned cart series, or a promotional offer based on a selected location.
Finally, we merge segmentation with our powerful proprietary Automated Targeting & Retargeting tools to target current and prospective customers. Around the office, we lovingly refer to the combination of these tools as “Aviato,” as a tip of the hat to one of our favorite shows, HBO’s Silicon Valley. Aviato works with your Magento site, the Facebook Pixel, and your email service provider to target potential customers and retarget customers who have already been to your site. Segments can be applied to customers who are logged in to an account, to customers who are visiting your site but do not have an account, or both. We can combine segmentation and Aviato to target customers who have visited your site but not yet created an account. We then use email and social media to encourage them to create an account and/or make their first purchase, based on their browsing behavior. We can also target customers who do have an account and encourage them to reorder, leave a review, or purchase a recently viewed product. Lastly, Aviato can use look-a-like audiences to target customers who have never been to your site but have similar characteristics as your current customers and are likely to be interested in your products or services.
As you can see, segmentation in Magento Enterprise can revolutionize your marketing plan if you know how to leverage it. If you are interested in learning more about how ParadoxLabs can implement these tools and tactics for you, let us know here or call us at 717-431-3330.