Tutorial 4.2: Segmenting your customer database to create mailing lists

This is a step-by-step guide to creating a targeted mailing list for an email series.

Creating a Mailing List with All Recent Purchasers

Login to your your sites administration dashboard, go to Marketing -> Segment Your Customer Database. This will take you to the custom customer reports section where you'll be able to define your recipient selection criteria

Creating a new customer report

Click on the 'Create a New Customer Report' button shown in the action box.

Now, choose your report type. Each report type will result in a list of customers. However, each different report type will also enable you to set extra criteria and export extra information based on the report type you choose. For creating email marketing lists we're interested in the 'Contacts' type reports.

• Contacts Only is for a mailing list whose criteria and results are purely based on contact records (such as location, age, gender etc)
• Customers and Cases is for creating mailing lists based on who has submitted web forms and their responses.
• Customers and Orders is for creating mailing lists based on customers orders e.g you may want to target high spenders at your online shop whose shopping basket exceeded a certain value.
• Customers and Opportunities is creating mailing lists to be sent to prospects who have sales opportunities in your system. You may want to send an email to the group of prospects who are in the final stages of the sales pipeline to give them a final push.
• Customers and Bookings is for creating mailing lists to be sent to customers who have made bookings in your systems before.

Important Each Report Type is slightly different. We recommend you explore each type to understand the differences fully.

Example: Creating a Mailing List of Customers Who've Purchased Within 3 Months

You're going to work through a quick example on how to create a list of all the customers who've made a purchase on your online shop over the last 3 months by selecting the 'Customers and Orders' report type and clicking next. This will join the customers and their orders so when you apply your filtering criteria to each customers orders.

Selecting What You Want To Show

When creating a mailing list, the system will put the customers name and email addresses into the list only. However to check that our report is correct, it's helpful to show any other relevant fields. In this example we'll want to show the 'Order Create Date' as well so that when we see the results of our search we can do a visual check to make sure all the orders are indeed within the last 3 months.

Choose the following fields:

• Customer Name
• Email 1 (Primary) - so we can see the customer's email address
• Order Create Date - so we can see when the customer last made a purchase

Click 'Next' to move onto the following step.

Filtering Your Customer Records By Their Last Order Date

In this stage of the process you'll need to apply the search filters to your customer records. Because your Customer Records have been joined to their respective Order Records you'll be able to use apply filter criteria to the orders as well as the customer details.

To find all the orders that have been created in the last 3 months: select 'Order Create Date' as the field you want to apply the filter to, then select 'Greater Than' as the search criteria and select a date 3 months in the past as the search value. This will return you all the customer records that have had an order create date within the last 3 months.

Click on 'Generate Report' after you've set your criteria

Creating a Mailing List with your search results

You should now see a list of customers with their email addresses and their online shop order dates as well.

To add these customers to a mailing list you'll need to click on the 'Add Customers To' then choose the mailing list and then click on 'Submit'

Target With Laser Focus

You've now successfully created a targeted mailing list for customers who've made a purchase on your online shop in the last 3 months. As you would've noticed, you have the ability to select customers based on all different types of criteria that you're able to choose in the filtering step. And it's not just Customers and Orders you can target, you've got the option of creating mailing lists with customers who've submitted an inquiry in the last month by using 'Customers and Cases' or a mailing lists with customers who are close to the end of your sale pipeline with 'Customers and Opportunities'.

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