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Customer segments
Overview
A customer segment is group of customers who share one or more attributes that are relevant to marketing activities. For example, you can define a customer segments that contain...
- All registered customers
- all customers who have spent over $1000 at the store
- all male customers over the age of 40
You can then use these customer segments as targets for advertising, promotions, and suggestive selling.
The customer segments you create in Management Center are considered dynamic because customers belong to them based on their personal data, purchase history, and behavior, all of which can change over time.
For example, you can create a customer segment that contains registered customers only, which means unregistered customers are excluded. As new customers register, they are dynamically added to the segment.
Customer segments also support static criteria. For example, you can explicitly include or exclude particular customers or accounts, which overrides any defined dynamic criteria. In this way, you can include a customer in a segment that he or she would otherwise not match, or exclude an account from a segment that it would otherwise match.
After you have created a customer segment, you can specify that customer segment as a target when you create:
- Web and Dialog activities
- E-mail activities
- Promotions
You can create and manage customer segments using the Marketing tool in the Management Center. If the store has enabled workspaces, you can manage customer segments using workspaces and inherit the benefits from that feature.
Select a set of attributes from the customer segment properties view
The Management Center provides a series of tabbed pages for creating customer segments, called the customer segment properties view. Each tab contains a set of attributes. You can define a customer segment using any combination of attributes in the properties view, as long as the store gathers and stores customer data for those attributes in the WebSphere Commerce database. For example, to define a customer segment containing male customers over 40, the store must gather and store gender and age information about customers. Typically, a store gathers this information through the registration and account update processes.
For B2B stores, the customer segment properties view contains an additional Accounts tab that contains attributes related to customer accounts.
Use marketing activities to add or remove customers
The Management Center provides an action element you can add to any Web or Dialog activity that adds customers to or removes customers from a customer segment based on their behavior as they participate in the activity. This is an ideal way to categorize customers for behavioral marketing initiatives. You must first use the customer segment properties view to create a customer segment; this customer segment does not need any attributes defined, but set a flag in the customer segment to allow marketing activities to populate the segment. You then create a Web or Dialog activity containing the action element that adds customers to or removes customers from the segment, based on what they do while shopping on the store.
Map between customer segments in Accelerator and Management Center
If you have used Accelerator in the past to manage customer segments, you can review this section to understand the differences.
All of the customer segment attributes available for defining customer segments in Accelerator are available in Management Center. Management Center has some additional features, described in the following table:
Accelerator Management Center Does not support creating customer segments using the Add To or Remove From Customer Segment Supports creating customer segments using the Add To or Remove From Customer Segment Does not include attributes for a customer's current age. Encludes a new attribute for Current age according to supplied birth date, in addition to the existing Age attribute supported in Accelerator. Note that in Management Center, the Age attribute has been renamed Age group. The customer segment notebook in Accelerator contains the following pages:
- Properties
- Registration
- Demographics
- Address
- Purchase Details
- Accounts (for B2B stores only)
The customer segment properties view in Management Center is organized with tabs similar to the pages in the Accelerator notebook; however, certain attributes have been moved into two additional tabs:
- Customer or Segment
- Miscellaneous
Customer segments created in Management Center cannot be edited in Accelerator. Customer segments created in Accelerator can be edited in Management Center.
Related tasks
Create a customer segment
Changing a customer segment
Delete a customer segment
Related reference