Segment Customers Based On Data Collected

In marketing, it’s good to know as much as you can about your customers.  But, it’s even better when you can act on that data.

TextMe now supports the ability to create segmented “filter groups” of customers based on information that you have collected about them.  Currently, TextMe only supports the ability to send targeted broadcast messages to subscription list subscribers within a certain filter group (more on this in the next blog post), but we have big plans for letting you manage and collect statistics on these filter groups in the near future.

Creating Filter Groups

To create a new filter group, click on the Contacts tab.  From there, you can use the new “Filter” section to create a series of filters to narrow down your contact list.

You can filter on any of the data attributes that exist in the User Data tab under Contacts.  You can also filter on a few system attributes, including opt-in date (the date/time that a customer opted into any of your subscription lists), source campaign (one or more of your campaigns that a customer has participated in), and keyword (the actual keyword a customer used to participate in one of your campaigns).

When your filters are setup the way you like them, click Apply to filter your contacts, and only show the contacts that match all of your filters.  In the screen shot below, we only see my customers who are Male and live in Chicago.

If you’re happy with the results, and confident that you’ve setup the filters properly, you can give the filter group a name in the box that says “Save this group of filters for future use under the following name“.  Clicking Apply with this field populated will save the group of filters into a filter group that can be used at a later point in time.

Managing Filter Groups

Managing filter groups is simple and straightforward.  Under the Contacts tab, there is a new sidenav option called Manage Filter Groups.  Clicking this option will bring you to a list of your existing filter groups.  In the screen shot below, you can see the “Chicago Males” filter group that was created in the steps above.  From this page you can see the number of contacts in each group.  By clicking on the links, you can edit, delete, or show the details for any of your filter groups.

Clicking on the name of the filter group will bring up the details for that filter group.  The details page lists the filters that make up the group, along with the list of contacts that are a part of that group.

Editing a filter group is easy as well.  Clicking the edit link from the filter group list page, or the Edit button from the filter groups details page will bring you to a screen where you can give your filter group a name, a description, as well as add or remove the filters that make up the filter group.  After saving the changes,  you’ll be brought back to the details page for the group, where you’ll be able to immediately see the result of your changes.

In the next post, I’ll describe how you can use filter groups to segment your customers, and send custom subscription broadcast messages to specific filter groups.