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With an overwhelming number of eCommerce stores rapidly flooding the market, market segmentation becomes one of the leading paths to a successful business. In Magento, it is called customer grouping or simply customer groups which help you to maximize your sales and marketing efforts along with value proposition.
Although Magento 2 customer groups exist within the platform, a few use them effectively to leverage their business objectives.
So, if you want to build relationships with your potential, create loyalty and increase your customer base you need to know how to manage customer groups in Magento properly.
That's what we're going to help you with in this guide.
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Before you dive into the multiple ways Magento customer groups can be used for your marketing efforts, you should know what it is and how to structure them correctly.
What are Customer Groups in Magento 2?
Magento 2 customer groups are segments of customers sharing the same needs, characteristics, and behavior. Segmentation into customer groups helps you to maintain accurate data and use it in your marketing strategy.
Since each customer group has unique interests and goals your job, as a merchant, is to resonate with those goals to maximize your business potential and provide more targeted service.
Examples of Customer Groups
Customer groups are usually based on demographics, geographic location, behavioral trends, and psychographics. So you can create customer groups in Magento based on multiple characteristics.
Some examples of the customer groups would be:
- Wholesale and retail — with different price lists.
- Silver, gold, and platinum — with special discounts based on customer loyalty.
- Special members or partners — with restricted access to certain content or special discounts.
- Location-based groups — with different prices and tax classes.
There is no limit to the number of customer groups you can create in Magento 2, though it already goes with the Wholesale, Retail, NOT LOGGED IN and General groups by default. The groups you create should represent not only customers' needs but your objectives since you will need to adjust your strategies accordingly.
Default Magento customer groups
How Can You Use Magento 2 Customer Groups?
There are plenty of possibilities to explore with customer segmentation in Magento. Except for prices and targeted emails you can also display personalized content, provide unique offers and offer personal discounts.
If you haven't started taking advantage of the customer group feature yet, read on to learn what you might be missing.
1. Add Customer Group Pricing
Taking retail and wholesale customers, both have different purposes, interests, and budgets correspondingly. To satisfy them both, the first thing you can implement is personalized prices.
Magento allows you to set prices for each product through advanced pricing based on customer groups. You can even choose whether to provide fixed amount prices or percentage discounts.
Customer group pricing options in advanced pricing
Customer group pricing helps you to appeal to the unique needs of each customer group and offer them something they will be interested in.
3. Set up Related Products Rules
Related Products in Magento 2 help you to maximize your marketing efforts and improve sales. However, you have to set them for each product manually relying on your preferences or observations. Not only is it ineffective, but time-consuming and daunting.
That's when related product rules come into play to help you automate the process. They help you to set conditions under which you want related products, cross-sells, and up-sells to be displayed on different pages of your store.
Customer group option on auto-related products rule options
However, what we're interested in is how these rules could help you personalize the offer.
Due to different needs and purchasing histories, different customers will be interested in different products. Related product rules allow you to display various product blocks based on customer groups.
Cross-sell block on product page
e.g. you can set up products with a higher price to be displayed to customers who purchase more or don't display them at all for NOT LOGGED IN customers, etc.
Who Viewed This Also Viewed That and Who Bought This Also Bought That blocks could be set up for each of the customer groups based on their data.
As long as you know your customers well, the opportunities are limitless with these rules.
4. Add Custom Product Tabs
The concept of customer groups is tied to the needs of each customer. So the information they are interested in and the questions they want answered are different correspondingly.
Although product tabs help you to organize product details and reviews, you can also use them to share shipping details, lisence agreements, return policies, and FAQs with regard to customer groups.
Custom product tabs on a product page
Wholesale customers might need to know whether you offer any special discounts or personalized terms for shipping. Retail, at the same time, would like to learn what are the return policy and refund terms.
To personalize your offer and satisfy each customer, you can add custom product tabs in Magento without any coding.
Customer group option in product tab settings
But customer group is not the only condition you can choose to differentiate the information you display in tabs. You can also choose the weekdays, dates, and any product attribute to define where and when the product tab should be displayed.
It is probably one of the best ways to appeal to each customer and offer unique information that resonates with their needs.
5. Define Catalog Price Rules
Do you know what is the best way to display discounts in Magento? Catalog price rules are the answer. They allow you to display discounted prices directly in the catalog so that customers can see them while browsing your website.
Catalog price rule general settings
But what is the point to display the same prices for everyone if you could offer them something special?
Catalog price rules, as you might have guessed already, could be based not only on product attributes but customer groups.
e.g. Wholesale customers might see the lowest discounted prices, while NOT LOGGED IN customers see the highest prices, even with the discount applied.
Catalog price rules applied on a category page
Personalizing the prices for the holiday season or some special occasion is key to skyrocketing your sales.
6. Enable Cart Price Rules
One more built-in sales generation feature is Magento cart price rules. They are almost the same as the catalog price rules. The only thing that differs is how the discounts are displayed.
Customer group option in cart price rule settings
While catalog prices rules allow you to display prices in the catalog, the cart price rule displays them only in the shopping cart and checkout. Besides, cart price rules allow you to create coupon codes that could be applied to the shopping cart.
A coupon code applied on the checkout page
You can create these rules based on multiple products and cart attributes, but, most importantly, customer groups. These rules help you to display discounts in the shopping cart automatically for different customers or provide coupon codes assigned to certain customer groups.
7. Configure CMS Content Restrictions
The holiday season is the time when you not only have to configure cart and catalog price rules to provide discounts for your customers. It is also time when you have to prepare banners to promote those discounts and notify customers about the sale going on.
In Magento, you can add banners through CMS blocks. But the best way to add a CMS block that appeals to each customer group is to create several of them. Displaying multiple CMS blocks on the same page would make it cluttered and the message wouldn't be conveyed clearly.
"Black Friday Sale" banner options for customer groups
CMS display rules allow you to define the display of the CMS blocks and pages per customer group. You can configure different blocks to be displayed on the same page, but each customer group will see the one created for them.
The same goes for CMS pages, you can make them accessible to different customer groups. Targeting each customer group with unique offers helps you to increase the likelihood of those customers converting.
But that's not it.
CMS pages and blocks could be enabled and disabled automatically based on the date and time settings. This feature is very flexible when you have an extensive customer database and need to display different content for each of the groups.
Example of personalized "Free Shipping" block on the shopping cart page
Customer segmentation in Magento is a must if you want to leverage your sales, build loyalty and maximize your marketing efforts. All customers are different, as we've already stated.
Whether you're creating customer group discounts, enabling CMS display rules, or adding customer product tabs, do it with your customer's needs in mind. Appealing to their needs creates a unique personalized experience they won't get in other stores.
