WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

There are not that many free and quality tools for eCommerce management. WooCommerce is one of such tools. It’s free and users love it for the simplicity. But even though it’s pretty clear how to use it, there are still some functions that need some deeper insight. This WooCommerce Customer Management Guide will tell you how to use it properly, and how to manage all the tools.

This guide caters to the interests of users who want to gain a better understanding of their customers’ needs. This guide will help you to understand how to use WooCommerce to the fullest and how to combine it with other plugins. You will learn how to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how to improve your eCommerce project.

In order to get sufficient information about your users, to manage the profiles of customers, and to create a successful strategy for your eCommerce store, you could use a compatible plugin called UsersInsights. The combination of WooCommerce and Users Insight will help you to manage users’ accounts and target clients depending on their needs. 

How to Manage Customers’ Profiles and Customers’ Data

As you know, when users buy something in online stores, they create accounts. For customers it’s good since they can see the purchase history, they don’t need to fill in the shipping data every time they buy goods or services, etc. But profiles are also an important source of data for an eCommerce project. They offer a better understanding of who are your users, what’s their age and gender, what are their most purchased items, etc.

So, managing customers’ profiles is an important step, especially when the store is getting bigger and the customer base keeps growing. You need to have a useful user’s profile to ensure you collect all the needed information. UsersInsights offers a pretty decent default profile which contains the following information:

  • Nickname or username, avatar, email address.
  • Location of the client.
  • Religion.
  • Interaction map location of a client (behind the avatar).
  • Purchase history.
  • Comments made by a customer.
  • The activity of a client (when last logged in, number of sessions).
  • Groups.

Even though these are pretty useful sections, there are some that are missing. For example, the age and the gender of the customer, phone number, occupation, interests, etc. For example, if you want to add a section when the client adds his number, you just need to go to the profile customization and add the phone number section. Click on the “add” section and fill in the fields. In the name type “Phone Number”, in the key section, type the meta key, and then choose the number of the field. Then simply save changes.

To change this situation and to add more useful fields, go to the UsersInsights plugin settings in the WooCommerce admin, and open the User Fields section. As you can see below in the screenshot, that’s how you can add a custom field to gather more information about users. This is how you can do it:

  • In the Field Name, type the name of the field, for example, Additional email.
  • In the Field Key, just duplicate the name of the field name like this: additional_email.
  • And in the Field Type, choose either number or text. Number means the user should insert numbers (as in zip code or phone number), and text indicates that a user should type text (as in email, interests, address, etc.).

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

Think about what information you would like to collect about your users to improve your business. And by using the mentioned above method, add more custom fields. That way you gain a lot more information than when you use a default profile.

You might think if you have an email, you don’t need a phone number. But users do not always use their active emails, and a phone number might be used in some messengers. That’s how you may send interesting offers to your clients depending on their needs. And to know the needs of the clients, you can also add an interest section to collect the needed data and offer only those products and services that might be useful for your clients.

Customer Notes

WooCommerce already has such a feature, but it is related to the comments about the order. Users can add notes, and then the administrator or managers could add additional notes to the order to make sure they didn’t forget anything. But what if you need to add notes about customers?

Your store will keep growing and at some point, you will notice that certain customers need more attention. Overall, it’s always a great idea to use different approaches to certain groups of clients. Creating notes might be helpful in such a case. If you have a team of employees, then it would be of great help to have notes about customers. That way you can brainstorm ideas about how to fix issues.

Here is how you can achieve the results:

  • Go to the UsersInsights plugin and find the Users section.
  • Use filters to find a customer that you have in mind to add notes.
  • Upon finding a user you want to add notes, click on the username.
  • You will be redirected to a user’s profile with all the data.
  • On the right side, find a Notes section and add notes that you want to add.

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

For example, the support team would appreciate it if they have a notes section. If there is a very demanding client and you don’t want to lose such a customer, it’s important to use a different approach. You should be very careful in your actions, and notes will help to deliver this message to other team members. 

This notes section could be also used to work with customers who are still deciding whether to buy something, For example, you could make a note on the customer profile’s page about sending a redeem code or a coupon so that the user could use it on something he or she wants to purchase in your store. Or you could add information about certain requests made by customers, so you won’t forget about it. 

Creating Groups

As it was mentioned, certain groups of customers need different treatment than other clients. For example, you have loyal clients, you treat them differently. You show them different ads, send different mails like similar products or notify them what’s in their cart, etc. But potential clients are treated differently. Plus, there are also other groups of customers you can create to manage your client base.

To create a group, you just have to click on the profiles section and bulk add all clients to a certain group. Near your clients’ names, you see the marks. For example, loyal, lead, or new. Here is how you do it:

  • Go to the users section.
  • Click on the Bulk actions section like in the screenshot below.
  • Choose users you want to add to a group (you can create it while adding users).
  • Tick all users who you want to add to a group.

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

You may remove and add new profiles, create groups while adding users, etc. Instead of creating a strategy for each separate customer, you create a strategy for a whole group. So if you want to manage your customers, it’s an essential step.

Customizing Fields

As it was already mentioned, customizing a client’s profile is very important when it comes to collecting data. Some fields you could add by picking several useful fields, others you should create on your own. For example, there is no such field as additional email or interests, etc. These fields you might need to create on your own.

Here is how you do it:

  • Go to the Fields section.
  • Choose an Add button.
  • You will see 3 fields: Field Name, Field Key, Field Type, fill them.
  • Save changes.

For example, in the Field name you type Interests, in the Field Key you add a meta description (interests), in the type you choose Text. When the user is filling the profile, in this section they can add interests in products. For example, a user prefers checking out software and electronic devices. When having such information, you can categorize people by groups like mentioned above in the article. Thus you may create a successful marketing strategy by showing ads of products to this user that he or she could buy.

It’s a great way to collect data related to users since the profile plays a role of a questionnaire or survey. With the help of customized fields, you could design your profiles exactly the way your company needs it. Instead of using standard applications, you create a customized profile where users indicate the information needed for your company to grow. Creating customized fields is easy, instead of simply picking default fields, you create customized ones.

Export Client Data

Even though WordPress is useful and easy to understand, it’s still better to store the important data elsewhere in case you will need to restore it in the future. It’s also wise to store a mailing list or spreadsheets elsewhere. 

The UsersInsights plugin offers a great aid in this case. All you have to do is to go to the users management section and choose the contacts you want to export. Here is how to do it in the plugin:

  • Go to the Users section.
  • Click on the icon as shown on the picture below.
  • Click Export data.
  • The data will appear on the Homepage of your computer as a csv file.

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

You don’t need to choose users, data of all these users will be exported to your computer. The list contains such data as the email, last order, the number of orders, lifetime value, etc. You can export data to analyze it later by using other tools. 

Track Activity

Tracking the activity of your clients is one of the most important things to do when creating a strategy. You should always keep in mind that there are various types of users. For example, there are loyal clients who are more engaged than other users of your online store. Each time they need to purchase something and they know your store offers these products, they will visit your web store rather than think of other online stores where they can buy something.

These clients are dream clients, but not all customers will be as active. You should keep in mind that some users create an account and visit your store when they have to buy a certain product. But they compare the prices to prices in other stores. Other clients are only potential customers since they have an account, they may have even added some things to cart, but have not completed any purchases. And of course, it won’t be wise to use the same strategy on all these highlighted groups of customers. 

But before you analyze users’ activity, you need to somehow collect it. To do so, do the following actions in the Users Insight plugin on WordPress:

  • Go to the Users section.
  • Use filter “last seen” to find active users, or use filter “number of sessions” to track most loyal customers.
  • Choose the most recent logins first or the bigger number of sessions first filters to make sure you see the most active users on top of the list.

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

The plugin counts the number of sessions, when was the last time a user has visited your website, etc. The session is counted as completed only when the user has shown some activity on the website. 

Even if some users won’t log out from their accounts, the plugin tracks activity. If there are no signs of activity even though the user is technically logged in, the session is considered to be over. That way you don’t miss the most active users and potential clients. You may also filter clients due to their activity and last seen online. 

Filter Customers by their Location

Of course, it would be nice to be the owner of such a famous online net that even customers from other countries buy in your store, but the reality is always different. The location of your customers plays a big role in your strategy. Just think about it, if you are using such means as SEO marketing, you definitely need to be aware of the number of clients from certain areas so you could gain a chance to target them.

Even such simple things as the browsing behavior of your customers and how much time you need to send the order to your client. So, this data is important not just to create a successful strategy to target clients by location, but it’s also important for the logistics, so it would be wise to segment your clients due to their geolocation. 

The UsersInsights plugin allows you to segment your customers by using just two ways – checking the interactive map or seeing the country on the list. If you use the first method, you see the map and all users in various countries, as well as the number of clients in each country. 

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

The second method might be more informative and you could even later on segment clients by groups depending on their location. The second method shows a list of customers and their countries. This plugin is simple since it is using the IP addresses of users to figure out where each user is. 

To do so, you need a Geolocation model of Users Insights in the WooCommerce section of WordPress. When you activate this module, it will detect users who are registered based on the IP-address. Here is what you need to do:

  • Go to the Users section of the UsersInsights plugin.
  • You will notice that after activating the geolocation module, you have several more sections – Country, Region and City.
  • If you want to see all users on an interactive map, click on the Globe icon as shown below.

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

You could also click on the username of a certain client and check out his profile. Right behind the profile’s avatar, you will see an interactive map with the location of this user.

Filter Clients Based on Purchase Habits

You can see what purchases your clients make, what additional items do they buy, etc. This will also help you build a better strategy which will be based on the purchase habits of your consumers. By using UsersInsights plugin, you can filter your customers based on the products they purchase. You could go further and use other filters related to purchasing, like country, number of purchases, types of purchases. That way you see what products are more popular.

Moreover, if such collected data can help with analyzing the behavior of your customers. For example, if the same client keeps buying phones, software, tablets, different accessories for the bought devices, etc., then you could target the client by sending emails with similar products he might be interested in. The same strategy could work with people who are still deciding whether to purchase something. Based on their habits, you could target them by offering similar products to choose from.

To filter users based on their orders, here is what you need to do:

  • Go to the UsersInsights plugin and choose filters.
  • In the filters section, pick Ordered products, and include the product that you are interested in, for example, type of software.

You will see the list of users who bought this product and also the number of orders.

Find Loyal Customers

When someone is working on increasing the client’s database, it’s always important not to forget about the loyal users. Sure, they might love your online store, all the bonuses you offer, the quality of products, but your competitors are not sleeping too. Your loyal customers produce your stable revenue, so it’s important to differentiate who is loyal and treat them differently.

It’s extremely easy to figure out who are loyal customers by simply filtering your customers by the number of made purchases: 

  • Go to the Users section in the UsersInsights plugin settings.
  • Choose the filter Number of orders.
  • Choose the descending order.

WooCommerce Customer Management Guide

On top of your list, you will see how many purchases each user is making, where they live, etc. This method will allow you to find the most loyal users, especially, considering that you also see other data in the list. That way you could reward your most loyal users, or add a note to remind that certain users should be rewarded. 

Conclusion

Today, we have tons of tools that help us create successful strategies to optimize the work of eCommerce stores. With this WooCommerce Customer Management Guide, you know how to manage your WooCommerce users with simple plugins. It’s a simple method even though it might take some time to get used to. But as a result, you get a better understanding of your customer’s needs and their purchase habits.

Further reading

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