How To Group WooCommerce Customers To Manage Your Store?

Customer groups are far-reaching resources for managing your online store and running impactful marketing strategies. Also, conversion paths are crucial for a successful business. Therefore, you can segment your WooCommerce customers into groups with minimal effort by analyzing their conversion paths.

My recommendation is that you should definitely group your WooCommerce Customers for better organization. But what do we mean by grouping the customers? It is the method of narrowing down your target audience based on different attributes to sell to them exactly what they want.

It is natural to regard the grouping of your WooCommerce customers as building an asset for your own store. But the fact is that by using these customer segments, you can actually enhance their buying experience by providing customized services to them.

Now, the question of how to group and implement your strategy still remains

You might get overwhelmed with the idea of infinite WooCommerce customer groups. These might be based on demographics or the type of industry, lifestyles, behavior, loyalty status and the list is endless.

This is where you will feel the earnest need to formulate a well thought-out strategy taking into account the relevant data. It is crucial to be adept with the data that you are using because Jeff Weiner has very aptly mentioned ‘Data really powers everything we do’

To give you another reason, grouping your WooCommerce customers has been found to impact your conversion rates directly. Sounds easy? Just build a few categories and build marketing strategies based on different categorization principles. Ummm, yes it is indeed a cakewalk, if and only if you are well-versed with the right basis of grouping WooCommerce customers.

This is the complete guide for how to nurture different leads at different stages. You will also learn how to best classify your WooCommerce Groups to manage your store.

Types of WooCommerce Customer Groups

The pre-requisite to group WooCommerce customers into categories is understanding the needs of your business. To understand it better- if you are a B2B company, what is the most crucial information of your client that you seek? Obviously, knowing their industry type, previous engagement with your business, maybe their number of employees, or location will make perfect sense. While if you are a B2C business, probably knowing the behavior, lifestyle or social interests of your customers will help you in providing them a more personalized experience.

In short, the process to group your WooCommerce customers will:

1. Add on to the convenience of your customers, and
2. Unravel the utility of ready-to-be harnessed data.
3. Uncover numerous other possibilities for your business.

I think that is enough of the build-up to finally get to the point. The basis for different types of customer groups is described below. The geographic and demographic variables are the traditional methods of segmenting customers. The behavioral and psychographic factors have been developed more recently and found to be successful in facilitating a happy shopping experience for the customers.

1. Geographical Variables:

Grouping your customers based on geography will tell you where your clients live, what terrain and weather conditions impact their food, apparel, and lifestyle choices. Geographical grouping is also of assistance to finding the customers based on seasonal traits.

Once you have your customer WooCommerce groups ready, targeting them with the right offer at the right moment can help you tap most of the opportunities. For example, if your market comprises Indian customers, you will know Feb-March would be the perfect time to run the ‘Winter Sale’ for the north-Indian customers; and which customer group to target when launching the ‘Trending Summer Collection’ on your WooCommerce store.

The geographical variables comprise customer groups based on region, villages, cities, accessibility, terrain, and weather conditions.

2. Demographic Variables:

Demographic factors include information about your clientele related to their age, marital status, gender, income, and so on. If you study this information thoroughly, you can figure out crucial data such as who makes the buying decisions among your clients or their preferences based on their ethnicity, profession, etc. Forbes reported that women control 70-80% of all consumer purchasing decisions.

Thus, you can make your messages aptly personalized for the right customer groups. At the end of the day, it isn’t only you who benefits from the WooCommerce customer groups. It becomes a more convenient buying experience for the customers when they get to see relevant products and services at their doorstep (umm, or on their browser without having to scroll indefinitely).

The demographic variables help you sell specific products for a particular WooCommerce customer group.

Examples:

1. Toys are generally preferred by the younger age group.
2. Mercedes groups their customers based on their age and income to target their products appropriately.
3. Not to stereotype, but driving-related or financial services-related products are generally directed towards male clients.
4. Brands like ONLY, specifically target one gender.
5. Nykaa recently launched NykaMan to target men for grooming.

The demographic factors include age, gender, education, family structure, profession, religion, income, and ethnicity. You can collect these data from the signup form, surveys, or live quizzes.

3. Psychographic Variables:

Another way to group WooCommerce customers effectively is to club them on the basis of their social status, values, interest, and other psychological factors. This will help you in sounding more relevant to your customers.

How? One way to implement the psychographic grouping of WooCommerce customers is using the V.A.L.S. model. The VALS approach stands for Values, Attitude, and Lifestyles and groups the customers on the basis of motivation vs resources. These categories are as described in the image below. You can customize your customer groups using this framework.

Once you have the customer groups handy, you can now run your marketing campaigns through different channels, exploit microsites extensively for your product lines and converge your marketing efforts using a distinctive approach for each customer group.

This framework is only a direction in which you can segregate your customers. The real walk begins now when you customize these variables keeping in mind your business needs because as Vikram Seth once mentioned in ‘The Frog and the Nightingale’,

Your song must be your own

4. Buyer Behavioral Variables:

Another way to group your buyers into functional segments is by studying their buying behavior significantly. Now, this is where the tech geeks get full space to show off their analytics and data-related skills. You can gather most of the behavioral data through your customers’ activities on your WooCommerce store.

Behavioral Segmentation requires data on the user spending habits, purchasing habits, browsing habits, responsiveness to your cross-sell or upselling strategies. You can make informed decisions for allocating the time, energy, and resources to group your WooCommerce customers on the basis of who invested most time exploring your products.

You can further organize your behavioral WooCommerce groups into four categories based on

1. Purchase and user behavior
2. The timing or occasion of interaction
3. The unique value proposition sought by your customer
4. Customer loyalty

Here are some examples of managing your WooCommerce marketing strategy by using the data on customers’ behavior:

1. The notification for a first-time visitor on your store should sound like
   ‘Hey, Explore the latest trends’
2. For someone who has browsed through your products already, the notification should be tempting enough to make them stay back:
   ‘Buy now to earn 50 XYZ loyalty points’ or ‘Exclusive Offer. Valid only till Good Friday’
3. To recover an abandoned cart, you can simplify your customers’ path to revisit the cart by sending them the link in your message
   ‘When you are ready to buy, simply click here to reach your cart’

So, you can jot down the most engaged and active users of your online store using the behavioral variables. Employing a CRM or using many of the facilitating WooCommerce plugins, you can easily execute behavioral segmentation.

How to build and implement WooCommerce groups?

In theory, it sounds like all rainbows and unicorns while in implementation grouping WooCommerce customers might overwhelm you. You can follow a step-by-step process to avoid stumbling midway.

Data beats emotions…

Data has become synonymous with power. So the first step when you plan to group WooCommerce customers is to gather data.

Several things that you should keep in mind when diving into data collection include having a digital infrastructure to store your data.

Once you have a data storage system in place, you can pen down your goals for the data collection. Having goals in mind would narrow down your path and facilitate the process of segmentation.

The next step should be figuring out your ‘how’? Depending on your business type, you can spot your target audience and run polls or run offers and rewards in exchange for questionnaires.

Data collection is something you must be already acquainted with, so let us quickly get to the point. The crucial thing here is the periodic assessment of your data collection methodology. Employ A/B testing and stay up to date with the latest tools and best practices such as email subscription forms, chatbots, checkout forms, surveys, etc.

Torture the data long enough to make it speak for you…

Employ data analytics is what I am referring to, here. Google Analytics is an effective tool for the same. You can utilize two types of data subsets using google analytics- user segments and session segments.

User segments in google analytics include information about demographics, location, behavior on the basis of website session lengths and repetitive visits, devices that access your WooCommerce store, channels through which your customers reach you.

Session Segments in google analytics include the specifics of user behavior in a particular session.

You can add or create new user segments by clicking on the ‘Add Segment’ button that appears at the top of a report. The segment builder will open displaying both the default and custom segments. This is where you will also get the opportunity to configure the default and custom segments.

Here is an example to explain how google analytics can be effective in user segmentation. The merchant created a custom segment for users who ‘made no purchase’ and compared it with the segment that consisted of users that ‘made a purchase’. Using these segments, the merchant was able to identify that most of the users who made no purchase were first-time visitors.

Feed Your Unicorn With the Berries!

This is the step where segmentation will indeed be rainbows and unicorns. Your customer segments will be the berries that you can feed and direct your business with!

That is perhaps enough of metaphors. The point is- now that you have your data storage system ready and live data to compare and make your lists, you can club it with your marketing strategy. It will now be a lot easier to send offer-based emails or quickly update your lists by using the right tools. The scope is covered in the latter part of this article.

WooCommerce Groups- Plugin Recommendations

I have collated some plugins that you can make use of to use your WooCommerce customer groups efficiently.

1. Groups for WooCommerce

Groups by itthinx is a free plugin that allows you to create memberships and control access to the content on your online store based on customer groups. Using this plugin, you can manage unlimited customers. The default list of ‘registered users’ is created and new users are automatically added to it.

This plugin offers interesting features such as letting you set ‘group hierarchies’, and that you can control the access to your content, products, etc. in two ways- Control access by capabilities and control access by groups. Another feature of the plugin is that it allows you to block your content for certain customer groups.

2. User Insights

User Insights is a paid plugin with comprehensive features. Their motto is to ‘get you everything about your users at one place’. The smart filters in this plugin let you analyze the data effortlessly and answer all your questions related to them.

You can also export your WooCommerce lists using this plugin. User Insights also allows integration with WooCommerce memberships, WooCommerce subscriptions, and other handy tools. Other features include reports using which you can view real-time user data, custom user fields, user notes.

There are more features included in this plugin that make your spending totally worth it.

3. WooCommerce Customers Manager

WooCommerce Customers Manager by Vanquish is a basic WooCommerce groups plugin that helps you in assigning user roles to your customers.

The plugin lets you spot your valued customers besides allowing you to view the products purchased by each buyer. The interesting feature of this plugin is that it provides for appropriate visualizations.

You can easily import or export customer lists in CSV format and edit or delete the information of any registered customer. This customer manager also has convenient visualizations for data analysis. Thus, updating your lists will no more be a hefty task that too for a nominal price.

Conclusion

To sum it up, there are different classes to let you group your customers- demographic, geographical, psychographic, and behavioral. You can not only use these concepts to prepare your customer lists but can also make a comparison between these lists to derive maximum benefits for your business. While customer segmentation will make the implementation of your marketing strategy easier, it will also enhance the customer experience in your store.

This is only the surface of the ocean when it comes to grouping WooCommerce customers. The ocean will open up once you get yourself going. Install the tools and give segmentation a start right away. Feel free to leave feedback or comment your queries.