This tutorial will show you how to create a dynamic Email Marketing List by segmenting your customer database based on different criteria. When you do this, you'll be able to send highly relevant emails to a group of well qualified recipients which boosts the performance of your Email Marketing.
The first step is to generate a customer report based on the criteria you desire to segment your customer database. To do this go to Reports > Create a Customer Report > Create a new Customer Report. If you already have a saved customer report you would like to use, you can skip this step. Once you have created and filtered your customer report, save this report with a relevant name. For further details on creating and saving customer reports, refer to this article.
Note: If a saved customer report is used as a recipient list, then it cannot be deleted until the either the campaign this is used on is deleted or this report is unselected from the campaign details page.
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.
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 show the 'Order Create Date' as well, so that we can visually confirm that the customers placed their orders within the last three months.
Choose the following fields:
Click Next to continue.
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 Generate Report after you've set your criteria.
You should now see a list of customers with their email addresses and their online shop order dates as well. To use these customers for an Email Campaign, you'll first need to save this customer report.
Now that you have created and saved your customer report, we can now create an Email Campaign that will send to the customers returned from our report in the previous step. To do this, go to Marketing > Email Campaigns > Create a new Campaign. Select a one-off email campaign type and click Next. Enter the campaign details such as name, delivery date and email address, then click Next
You will now be taken to the campaign recipients selction page, here you will need to click on Use a saved report as a list.
You will now be shown a list of saved customer reports. Select the report you created in step 1 and then click Next.
Continue through the steps of completing the email campaign and send it. This campaign will now send to the customers from the customer report created above.
You can now use this same customer report for future Email Campaigns where the customer list will be generated dynamically as customers fall into the criteria of the customer report.
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