Customer Groups and Tags: Why You Should Use Them (and How You Can in Glew)

Some retailers may have one primary customer base - a local boutique that markets to millennial women, for example, or restaurant supply store that caters to industry professionals.  However, it's much more likely that a retailer's customers can be split up into several distinct groups. Take an athletic accessory brand that sells products to help improve performance or relieve pain. Their customer base could contain any of the following:

 
• Individual consumers, purchasing products for their own use
 
• Other retailers, purchasing products wholesale to sell in their own stores
 
• Doctors or physical therapists, purchasing products to provide to their patients

That brand needs to be able to evaluate the performance of each of these groups independently, since they're buying products in drastically different quantities, from different channels. They need to be able to set unique pricing for different groups and run unique promotions. They need to be able to segment each group and market to them differently.  That's where customer groups (or tags) come in. Read on to learn more about customer groups and how you can use them in Glew (one of our newest features!).

What are customer groups?

Customer groups are just what they sound like - a way to track and report on smaller cohorts of your customers who have unique purchasing behaviors, demographics or needs. It can vary by name, but most ecommerce platforms have some way to designate customer groups - BigCommerce and Magento call them groups, while Shopify calls them customer tags.  A store can designate their own customer groups or tags, since they'll be different for every business. One example, like we mentioned before, is for individual consumers and wholesalers. One could be for tax-exempt status. Another could be for Amazon Prime customers. Yet another could be for different customer loyalty statuses.  Within your ecommerce platform, you can use customer groups or tags to identify a customer as a member of a group. Then, you can typically view and edit that group in bulk, apply discounts or unique pricing, restrict certain products and categories or shipping and payment methods, or display content only to members of that group. (Some of these may require additional plug-ins or platforms.)  Learn more about how to use customer groups or tags in several of the platforms Glew integrates with:

 
• Shopify Customer Tags
 
• BigCommerce Customer Groups
 
• Magento Customer Groups
 
• Zoey Customer Groups
 
• Maropost Customer Groups

New in Glew: Customer groups reporting

In one of our most recent feature releases, Glew now offers customer groups/tags reporting for Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Zoey and Maropost. This allows Glew users to see customer group or tag data from their ecommerce platform in Glew alongside their other critical ecommerce data, track performance for each group using Glew's powerful reporting functionality, and use those insights to drive decisions on pricing, promotions, products, marketing and more.  Something to note: the same revenue preferences you set for your store will apply to your customer groups and tags.  Here are just a few things you can do with customer groups in Glew:

Track your group performance

With Glew's user-friendly visualizations, you can get a deep dive into the performance of each of your individual groups - on a level that's typically reserved for your entire store. See core KPIs like revenue, number of customers, orders, gross profit, average order value and lifetime value at a glance, or drill down within a group to see more detailed metrics like performance over time, total items sold and most popular products, total discounts and refunds, average items per order and more.

Customer tags KPIs for a Shopify store. These display on the customer groups/tags homepage.

Performance breakdown for customer tags, showing revenue for each customer tag

See LTV for customer groups

We just mentioned LTV, but it's worth highlighting. Customer group LTV is something that's not typically available within your ecommerce platform, but it's incredibly important for retailers to track. You likely have different expectations for LTV for your individual customers than you do for your wholesalers, for example, so it's critical to be able to stay on top of both of those metrics separately.

Drill down into individual groups

Glew's customer groups feature gives you great at-a-glance metrics, like the ones shown above. But you can also drill down for a more granular look at a group's performance. See revenue, customers, orders, gross profit and average order value trending over time. This is also where you'll see super-specific data on individual customers and products within a group.

Revenue over time for an individual customer group in Glew

View customers and products within a group

In Glew, you can view the individual customers within a group or tag and view their performance as it relates to that group. See and filter individual customers by email, first and last order date, total orders, total revenue, average order value, total items purchased, total discounted, total refunded, location, channel/campaign, device and more.  You can also see individual product performance within a group, including orders, quantity sold, gross revenue, profit and margin, refunded orders and amount refunded, COGs and more. This allows you, among other things, to see which of your products are performing best among a group, and decide which ones to promote or discount.

What you can do with customer groups

So - what are some actionable takeaways from all these insights on customer groups? What you do with customer groups depends in part on your business - every business has different use cases for their specific customer groups and tags. But there are a few things every business can - and should - do with customer groups data in Glew:

Better understand customer group performance and behavior

Understanding your customers and their behavior is key to growing your business. Robust reporting on customer groups helps you do that on an even more granular level. When you know more about your key customer cohorts - including details like when and what they're purchasing, which channels they're purchasing through and more - you're better equipped to make decisions that will keep them coming back.

Make smarter pricing and discount decisions for different groups

When you have more granular data on your customer groups, you can make smarter pricing decisions that drive sales. For example, you might notice that you have the room to offer wholesale purchasers a better discount to drive volume, or see the opportunity to offer a deep discount or other perk to your loyalty program members to keep them engaged with your brand. Whatever decisions you make, you'll be able to base them on accurate data about your customer groups' behavior and preferences.

Run targeted marketing campaigns to customer groups

Marketing messaging that your individual customers find compelling might not work for your wholesale or B2B buyers, and vice versa. With customer groups, you can easily segment and download each cohort and use them to create unique, targeted campaigns that are more effective - whether it's an email campaign in MailChimp or Klaviyo or a Facebook lookalike campaign. You can also easily figure out which products to promote to which audiences, based on what's performing best.  Want to see Glew's customer groups reporting in action? Start your free trial today, or learn more about Glew.