1st customer! "New Customer" without an order. Does this mean they created an account?

I have a new customer in “Customers” tab. Does this mean they filled out their information, but didn’t purchase anything/abandoned cart? Or does this just mean they created an account? Could someone answer this for me? Thank you so much.

Hi @ChanceryLane !

Finley from Shopify here, thank you for reaching out about this.

Customers

The customers you see in the Customers section of your Shopify admin may be there for a few reasons including:

  1. The customer has placed an order on your store.

  2. The customer has added items to their cart but has not completed the checkout process. This would result in an abandoned checkout which you can view under your Shopify Admin > Orders > Abandoned checkouts.

  3. They have signed up for your newsletter. This is a great way to collect customer emails for any email marketing you may do in the future. You can review our guide on how to add a newsletter signup to your website.

  4. The customer has created an account with you. Keeping in mind that in order for this to be an option, you’ll need to ensure you have enabled customer accounts as optional under your Shopify Admin > Settings > Checkout > Customer Accounts.

  5. You also have the ability to manually add customers yourself, which you can do by importing a customer list.

Filtering customers

Something you may find handy is the filter feature in the customer’s section, where you can filter down certain criteria, as well as save customer groups.

For your situation specifically, you can use the Customer account status and Abandoned checkout filters to see if the customer you are referring to shows under the criteria selected.

In this example, I’ve filtered down to customers who have subscribed to emails:

20-08-i441l-fr5zy.

Clicking on the customer’s name and looking at their timeline may also give you an idea of where they came from:

20-08-s2498-5ecdn.

Were you able to locate where the customer originated from using one of these methods? Please feel free to reach out if you are still unable to find this.

Email Marketing

Building your customer list can be used for email marketing and if this is a marketing avenue you’re interested in, we do have features and resources available to help support this.

Apps

Shopify email is built right into the admin, which is free to use until October 1, 2020. After this date, 2500 emails can be sent per month for free. If you were to exceed the 2500 emails for the month, it would cost $1 USD for every 1000 emails sent after that.

Alternatively, there are many third-party email marketing apps which you may be interested in. Some popular options include Omnisend and Seguno. If you need a hand with a third-party app, each has its own support team, whose details are available in the app listing.

Education

If you are interested in learning more about email marketing, we offer a wonderful free video course on Shopify Compass, Email Marketing 101, as well as a thorough written guide.

These will walk you through the process of:

  • Why email marketing would be beneficial for your business and how to get set up
  • How to start building your customer list
  • How to write an effective email, as well as what types of emails you can send, such as abandoned cart and welcome series emails
  • Evaluating your analytics to understand how your emails are performing

I hope this helps!

Cheers,