Top Ways to Use Segmentation in WooCommerce

Segmentation in WooCommerce

Do you remember the first day you started your business? 

You will surely remember little details about your initial customers – their names, purchases, location, and a lot more…

But as you get more and more customers, the amount of data you need to deal with grows exponentially. And of course, you need tools to make sense of all this data.

Today, in this article, I will show you how you can make sense and money by understanding your WooCommerce data using the magic of Segmentation.

The importance of segmentation

Segmentation is considered to be one of the most effective marketing strategies of this decade. Marketing gurus, entrepreneurs, internet marketers, all stand by the benefits of segmentation.

Before diving into the advantages, lets understand what is segmentation? 

Segmentation is nothing but dividing your entire into a smaller subset. For instance, filtering out customers who live in the United States or filtering out customers who have demanded a refund.

Advantage of segmentation?

  1. Dividing data into smaller subsets helps business owners spot trends. Like; Product A and B sell well together.
  2. It also helps business owners make critical marketing decisions. Like; Suppose a business gets more paying customers from North America over South America, marketers can run targeted ads only in North America.
  3. Segmentation also answers everyday business questions. Like; How many new customers did I make this month? 
  4. It improves email marketing. Instead of sending out a blanket email, business owners can send out personalized emails using segmentation. For example: Segment out customers who have not purchased from you over a year and provide them a store credit which encourages them to make a purchase from your store.
  5. Better customer support. Segmentation gives you/your support team the power to dissect data and use it to your advantage like providing better customer support. Like, if you segment the top 20% of your customers, you will know who are the top customers and you can provide the top-notch priority support if the need arises.

So these were a couple of benefits that segmentation provides. So why isn’t data segmentation used that widely?

This is because, business owners find it difficult to keep a track of all the data, analyse multiple data points, and then take decisions.

Doing this manually using data queries is again cumbersome and would require technical know-how + high server capacity. This again is not something most stores have the bandwidth for.

Recognizing this, tools like Shopify, WooCommerce provides you some basic form of segmentation within their dashboards.

But again they have some gaps -they don’t offer advanced segmentation, they lack the ability to save segments, quickly export data via CSV, intuitive search, calculate key metrics for every segment, share stats with the team, and a lot more.

Hang on, I will reveal a solution to all these problems. So keep reading…

How to segment data within your WooCommerce Store

Before going into advanced segmentation, I will show you the basic segments that are available within core WooCommerce.

WooCommerce has some basic built-in filters under Orders that let you filter data on order status, month, and customer who made that order.

Store owners can use these filters to slice and dice their data but realistically speaking, once the data is filtered the next step is exporting this data. Sadly, the export feature is not provided within WooCommerce and you need to install a paid plugin to achieve this. Read more about it here.

But exporting is not the only handicap when it comes to in-built WooCommerce filters. Here are some other limitations:

1. You can’t save segments, filters for future use.
2. Limited to basic filters like the ones mentioned above.
3. It’s very time-consuming as you need to run each filter one-by-one.

But there is a way out.

You can eliminate all these limitations by using a solution named Putler. Putler helps you segment not just orders but all other key aspects of your WooCommerce business-like – products, customers, sales and transactions.

Let’s dive deeper…

Take WooCommerce segmentation to the next level

In a nutshell, Putler is a business analytics and insights solution. It aggregates data from your payment gateway, eCommerce platform, shopping cart, and Google analytics and shows you a big picture of your business.

Apart from giving you in-depth reports on products, customers, sales, orders, website audience it also provides you useful features like – multi-store reporting, infinite segmentation, goal tracking, performance comparison, SaaS metrics, and a lot more.

In this article, we will focus particularly on the feature of infinite segmentation.

Connecting your WooCommerce store to Putler

The first question store owners worry about is, will this plugin make my website slow? The answer is no. Pulter is a standalone web app, you simply need to add the Putler connector to your store and that’s it. Putler will do all the processing at its end and there is absolutely no effect on your website whatsoever.

Connecting your WooCommerce store to Putler takes under 5 minutes. Take a look at the steps here.

How to filter data within Putler?

  1. Once your store is connected to Putler, you can go to whichever dashboard you want to segment data for. 
  2. Next, adjust the time range you want the segment for.
  3. Either select from the ready to use filters provided to the left.
  4. Or create a custom segment by clicking on the ‘Add filter’ button provided on the top left corner.
  5. Export the segment

Infinite segmentation for your WooCommerce store

As mentioned above, Putler lets you segment all aspects of your store. It also has a dedicated dashboard for each. Let me break it down one by one.

Segmenting Sales/Orders/Transactions

Orders are a major component for every online store. Putler makes it super simple for business owners to dig deep into their stores sales via segmenting. Store owners can segment orders based on multiple parameters. Like;

  • Location
  • Products
  • Order status
  • Amount ranges

How you can use this?

Using these filters you can create multiple segments and answer day to day questions like:

  1. How much sales did you earn from United States in the last 3 months?
  2. Which orders got refunded in the last month?
  3. How many units of Product X were sold in the last week?

NOTE: You can select whatever date range you want to. Also you can either choose to select one/multiple of the ready-made filters or create custom segments and then save them for later use.

Segmenting Customers

After orders, the next aspects which needs monitoring is customers. The better you understand your customers and their needs, the better you can service them. Segmenting customers based on their similarities helps you draw strategies and improve customer relationship.

Similar to orders, Putler provides some ready made filters for segmenting customers as well:

  • Location
  • Products
  • Revenue contribution
  • Customer type
  • Customer since
  • BONUS: RFM segmentation – segment customer based on their shopping behavior

How you can use this?

You can apply the above fitlers individually or create combinations and segment customers based on your requirements.

Once customers are segmented you can then send them highly targeted emails like;

  1. Festive offers – Segment customers from a particular region and send them an email during a popular festival in that region. Example: Send an email to Irelanders during St. Patricks Day.
  2. Upsells – Find which products sell well together or are complementary and upsell the complementary product to customers who have bought just one of the complementary products.
  3. Early bird offers – Find out your most loyal/ best customers and send them early bird discounts for a new product you are launching.

Segmenting Products

As store owners it is our duty to pay attention to our products.We need to stay on top of trends and make changes to our products inorder to increase sales. Product segmentation helps you slice and dice product data and spot opportunities and threats. 

Here are some ready to use product filters provided by Putler:

  • Number of customers
  • Quantity sold
  • Average price
  • Refund percentage
  • Attributes
  • Categories
Segmentation in WooCommerce

How you can use this?

Using these filters you can take multiple strategic decisions like;

  1. Find the best selling product and the least selling product and bundle them
  2. Find which average pricing has the maximum customers. This is the pricing sweetspot that your customers are most comfortable in.
  3. Check which variation sells more and increase inventory for that variation only.

Over to you

Segmentation is powerful and using it the right way can help you grow your store in multiple ways. Do try out the tips mentioned in this article and share the results. Also, if you have other hacks/tips  with regards to segmentation feel free to comment below.

Further reading

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here