Customers

Customer Segments

Customers' segmentation is a marketing strategy which involves dividing of a target market into subsets of customers that are similar in specific ways, for example customers from a certain country or those customers who are essential for your business prosperity. Because your individual customers have different needs, it will be easier to give them what they want if you divide them into groups and treat each group differently. Using customer segments you can build loyal relationships with customers by developing and offering them the products, content and services they want.

You can assign customer segments to:

• Content elements
• Menu items
• Payment methods
• Shipping methods
• Discount codes
• Cookiebar

When you assign a customer segment to Content Elements, Menu Items, Payment Methods, and Discount Codes, you will see the icon  indicating that the customer segment is assigned.

To create a customer segment, in Sana Admin click: Customers > Customer segments.

You can use the data from the Sana database and from your ERP system.

To create a customer segment, click New item, enter the title and set the filter expressions by specifying:

• Field name
• Condition
• Value

Filter expression is used to filter the customers that should be in the customer segment.

The field names in the Field name dropdown list are retrieved from different places.

There are four sources of data which can be used to create customer segments:

• Customer data from ERP
• Customer's sales statistics from ERP
• Shop account from Sana database: last login date of a customer, whether a user is logged in or not, and shop account type (customer, contact and sales agent)
• Basket from Sana database: the date when the shopping cart was modified by a customer for the last time and how many hours ago, and the number of items in the shopping cart

Customer fields may differ depending on the ERP system you are connected to as customer fields are retrieved from the customers table in your ERP system.

When you create a customer segment, filtering is performed by field, condition, value and by different filter expressions within the same field.

If you define different fields, filtering is fulfilled taking into account all selected fields. For example, if you create the customer segment by specifying filter expressions "Currency" = "USD" and "Country/region" = "USA", a group of customers who are from the United States with the currency dollar will be created. In this case the customers in your ERP system will be filtered by the fields "Currency" AND "Country/region".

If a customer segment contains filter expressions within the same field, it will include customers which fit at least one of the filter expressions of this field. For example, if  you create a customer segment by specifying filter expressions "Total orders" < "100", "Total orders" between "200…500", and "Country/region" = "USA", the customer segment in which the customers placed "100" orders OR meet the range "200…500" will be created. In this case the customer segment will include the customers from the United States whose amount of total orders fits at least one of the filters or both.

Date fields

When you create a customer segment, at the top of the page you can see the list of predefined filters which you can use for date fields. You can either specify exact date using the calendar or you can use one of the predefined filters.

If you need to create a customer segment with some date fields, for example the last login date of a customer, you can now also use the predefined filter values, such as "[today]", "[thisweek]", "[lastmonth]", etc. This way you have more flexibility in using date filters and you don't need to update dates all the time.

Content management

Customer segments can be assigned to any content elements on the flexi-pages, product list and product pages. It allows to show different content elements on a page to specific customer groups. When you set up customer segments for the content elements of the page, you can show a certain content only to the customers which are in the customer segment. All other customers will not see this content element. This way you can fill your web store with the customer-specific content.

If you assign a customer segment to a content element, then you will see the icon  on the expandable item block. This way a user can see an overview of all content elements on a page to which customer segments are assigned and don't need to check the settings of each content element.

For more information about different pages which can be created for your web store and content management, see "Web Pages".

E-mail marketing

You can even use customer segments for the e-mail marketing extensions MailChimp and Dotdigital, to provide personalized messaging to the target audience. Use customer segments to create content for the promotional campaigns targeted to certain customers or market, or to satisfy your most profitable customers by giving them some discount offers and sending personalized e-mails.

Customer segments can be used for different purposes. The above mentioned scenarios are very useful in building marketing and promotional campaigns and thus loyal relationships with target audiences. But you can also use this feature for a different purpose, for example for A/B testing together with the MailChimp extension.