Not every Shopify store needs customer segmenting

Last week I was out with another business owner when they asked me about segmenting their customers.

She's heard from a bunch of consultants that segmenting her customers and email subscribers can help her growth. She wanted to know if that was true and how it worked, because no one was giving her concrete answers.

After a bit of back and forth we discovered that segmenting wasn't right for her at this time.

Segmenting can be powerful and can increase many of the important metrics (revenue, orders, customer happiness).

But with low-volume businesses, it loses some of it's effectiveness.

Since her business is about serving a handful of high-value customers, segmenting is overkill. She could easily segment in her head by thinking about individual clients, their needs, and sending them something ultra-personalized. Anything automated would cost her more time to setup and maintain than it'd return.

It'd be different story if she 10x'd her business and headcount. Then segmenting might be required to get through a growth plateau.

Even though I built and sell an app that makes it almost effortless to do customer segmenting in Shopify, it's still not for every store.

Just like this business owner, if someone doesn't have enough order volume to benefit from segmenting then having a tool do it for you is probably not going to be valuable.

The good news is that the threshold has been shrinking year-by-year so eventually everyone will be doing it and benefiting (your store, your customers, and app providers like me).

But not yet.

Eric Davis