Using Customer Segments for Product Promotion
Website personalization is becoming increasingly important, because every visitor has their own needs and interests. For companies with a large product range and a focus on different target audiences, it is often a major challenge to be relevant to each visitor. That is why CloudSuite uses customer segments and segment catalogs, which can be used to push products in product search and navigation trees.
By setting up customer segments (identifying an industry, customer type, or other), you can create so-called segment catalogs that only include products relevant to the customers in this segment. A customer of your webshop has access to the products from one or more standard catalogs. The segment catalog determines which of these products are promoted.
Customer segments are part of the Modified Ranking feature of our Relevance and Recommendations Module. How the products are promoted is flexible. You have several options and settings to determine what products are promoted first (sale items or segment-specific products). You can link a customer segment to one or various catalogs, or a registration form to automatically link new customers to a segment.
Customer segments always cause ranked products to be promoted, never demoted in the list of products that are shown. They are applied on searching as well as browsing the catalog. The only situation in which they are not applied is when manually sorting on anything other than "priority "or "relevance".
Key Features
- Create and manage segments
- Create and manage segment catalogs
- Link segments to parties
- Link segments to segment catalogs
- Link segments to default party for new registrations
How it Works
Let's say we have six products ranked alphabetically: A : B : C : D : E : F and a segment catalog F : D : B : X.
In this setup, F, D, and B must be pushed to the top of the list, while keeping the relative ranking defined for the main search result. (X is ignored, because it is not listed in the search results to begin with.) The expected result, therefore, is B : D : F : A : C : E.
The functionality is activated when the party has a linked segment and the segment has a linked catalog.
Customer segments can be combined with modified ranking.