Shopify Email Marketing and Customer Lists

[wlg]

I'm not sure which category to add this to because it applies to several. Here's the crux of the issue... I needed to quickly send an email to customers in Washington State to let them know our company would not be at a festival today as planned. Plan A was to give the Shopify Email Marketing App a shot and I ran into nothing but problems. All I wanted to do was create a segment for customers with a billing address that included Washington State, and I wanted to be able to select certain customers not to send this email to (such as our wholesale customers). I could not intuitively find anywhere to deselect customers from the segment. When I created the segment and I tried to edit customers, the message that popped up made it seem as if I was going to delete the customer altogether, not just from the customer segment. How do I remove just a few select individuals from a customer segment?

So, I went to plan B, and started checking "accepts email marketing" on every customer, with the intent of unchecking that checkbox for the customers I didn't want to send the email to. I could never complete this task because I kept getting Shopify Server errors. I have around 3500 customers and I tried selecting whole blocks at a time and clicking Save, or even just a few rows at a time and hit Save. I would get through a couple hundred, or a couple thousand and it would just stop saving and time out. After spending 2 hours doing this, I gave up. 

Plan C - I decided I would go back to paying for Omnisend, because I knew I could do these things in that app. So, I exported a full customer list with the intent of normalizing/cleaning the data before importing back into Shopify. This way, a clean customer list would be imported into Omnisend. Just to be safe, I downloaded the CSV template from the Shopify website help pages and the columns from the newly exported customer list and the CSV from the help pages do not match. The help pages still show the "Accepts Marketing" in column N. In the export I just performed, "Accepts Marketing" has been split into "Accepts Email Marketing" in Column D and "Accepts SMS Markerting" in Column O. I assume the current export is correct, but I am also worried about screwing up my customer data if I import the data back into Shopify incorrectly.

I realize that only Shopify sys/db admins can probably look into the Plan B problem, but if anyone has some idea on how Plan A or Plan C should work, I would be very appreciative for any helpful hints! I have already spent about 5 hours on this today and still haven't been able to send this email to my customers! Thank you!

[QuickCEP-]

hi @wlg ,

This is QuickCEP-software that can help you increase your income.

It is recommended that you use some third-party tools, like QuickCEP, a customer data analysis platform (CDP), which can filter customer groups and exclude those unnecessary customers to send. With this tool, you can reach your customers in an effective way.

Although it’s very good to choose Omnisend software, which is a relatively mature email sending platform, the disadvantage is that the cost of sending is a bit high.

QuickCEP includes the functionality of Omnisend's sending software, but also has a customer data platform that can meet your requirements. If you don't know how to use this software, you can contact customer service through live chat or email, and they will help you achieve what you want to do.

Besides, our product QuickCEP, a really cost-effective, useful marketing app. It helps you do all-round marketing automation with professional advice, build your customer data platform , and it also has chatbot function, which means you don't need to pay for Tidio、Omnisend、Klaviyo any more. Fill in the invitation code with '10KE' when registering, you'll get 1-year free trial, and 10,000 free emails for free! I hope this answer could help you out!

If you find this answer helpful, please give us a Like and Accept the solution.

Best Regards,

QuickCEP

[eganc]

Hi @wlg 

So sorry to hear about your experience.  It sounds like it was stressful.  I know you were doing this last month, so this may be a bit late, but I can tell you how I would have made Plan A work under 2 scenarios.

Scenario 1) if you are using the out of the box Shopify B2B (Wholesale) functionality, I would have created a segment that included everyone in Washington State, but excluded all B2B contacts:

customer_regions CONTAINS 'US-WA' AND companies IS NULL 

Scenario 2) you are not using Shopify's B2B functionality OR have other customers you want to exclude from the segment, then I would tag those customers with some tag like "do not email"  and add that as an exclusion filter, like so:

customer_regions CONTAINS 'US-WA' AND customer_tags NOT CONTAINS 'do not email' 

Scenario 2) is a more generally applicable way of doing this because it allows you to remove customers from a segment for any reason.  You can add tags to customers directly on their profile one by one, or you can add tags in bulk from the customers search results.

Hope that helps!

Egan