Customer segment sizing for smaller Shopify stores

Awhile back a Repeat Customer Insights customer and I were chatting about segmenting and their business goals.

The discussion brought up pain points that many Shopify stores have so I wanted to share the answers with you. The discussion meandered a bit so I'll re-organize it for you so it makes more sense.

Eric: what size of segments you're looking for? In other words, how many different campaigns do you have time and resources available to develop?

Merchant: My total engaged segment is about 1,500 and we have just over 1,000 customers ever in our Shopify store. I use Klaviyo, so creating segments is fast and easy, so I can generate campaigns quite easily

To make the math easy, with 1,000 people I wouldn't recommend any more than 10 segments for a given customer type. That's 100 people per segment and should make it clear if this type of segment performs or not. (You can do some calculations to get a more precise number but a larger, round number is easier to reason about).

A segment of 200 people would also work. That would match up with the Customer Grading built into my app (5 segments). It's not a pure 20%/20%/20%/20%/20% split because there's some adjustments made for ecommerce behavior but that could make for an easier starting point.

A lot will come down to how much time and resources you have.

Building 10 or even 5 campaigns can be a lot of work for a store without marketing staff. I'd recommend starting with the most valuable segment, build a campaign, launch it, and then work on the next most valuable one. By the time you get halfway through the list you might decide that's good enough and you have the results you want.

Eric Davis