How to Use Audience
Audience helps you discover knowledge hidden in the vast amount of data available about your customers. Every time your customers click around in your shop or place an order, data is saved. Having all that data creates the need for tools to extract useful information that you can use in your marketing efforts. Audience is just that.
The Available Data
When your customers are browsing your site, through cookies, we track the behavior and store it in our database. This data represents anything the customers view.
If customers place an order, Hello Retail tracks order date, size, amount, and the specific products. So, data representing the purchase. If you have order data from before becoming part of Hello Retail, this data will also be included in the available data as long as you have uploaded the data.
In combination, the View and Purchase data can tell you pretty much anything you want to know about your customers, as long as you can apply useful filters to the data. In Audience, these filters are called Segments.
Segments
Segments are the building blocks of Audience. A Segment is essentially a filter, that will look through the database and present you with data that fits the requirement of the Segment. There are several Segments to choose from (and we will add more along the way) and they are divided into two categories; View and Purchase, that represents data from browsing or purchase behavior, respectively.
The Segments can be stacked allowing you to apply multiple filtering options. A selection of Segments is called an Audience.
Create an Audience
Let's look at an example to get a feel for what is possible. To access Audience log into your account and click Audience.
Here you will see an overview of existing Audiences if you have created some. To create a new Audience, click Create new Audience.
Input a name for the Audience and add the first segment by clicking Add Segment.
Here you will see a list of Segments, that you can add. There are five available Segments, where we will click the second one; Purchased Products with Attributes.
This Segment will provide data about which customers have purchased products with certain attributes, that you define. The attributes available depends on the data you have provided in your product feed. A typically available attribute could be brand, and you can select that in the first dropdown. In the second drop-down, you will see a list of available brands on your shop and you can select one or more.
You can also specify a time period, for example, the last month. If no time period is specified, the segment will include all available history. Click Add to add the segment.
So, to recap: the above Segment will provide data on customers who have purchased Nike and Adidas within the last month.
When the Segment has been added, you will see it under Segments.
You can edit and delete the segment. Click Add Segment to add another Segment.
Now let's add the Previous Orders segment:
This Segment lets you find customers who made a number of purchases you specify. Here we choose customers who have made more than two purchases without specifying a timeframe, so including all historic data. Click Add to keep the segment.
Now we have added two Segments and you can choose if the customers you find should match All or Any of the Segments. If you choose All, the two Segments will be separated by "And", meaning that the customers should fulfill both statements of Segment 1 and Segment 2. If you choose Any, the Segments will be separated by "Or", meaning that the customers should fulfill either Segment 1 or Segment 2—not necessarily both.
When you have configured the Audience as you want it, click Create Audience. Now the system has to go through all the customer data and find customers who fit the Audience, you have created. This process will take some time, but you will receive an email when it is ready.
Let's take a quick look at what we have actually created here. We have created an Audience of customers who have shown interest in the brands Nike and Adidas and who have previously placed more than two orders on your shop. So these customers are loyal and it's likely they want to come back to your shop again. So if you have some new cool products from Nike or Adidas you want to promote, reaching this specific group of customers would probably be a very good use of your time.