How an eCommerce Business Automatically Segments Customers for Email Campaigns

A good fit makes all the difference, from shirts and shoes to an ergonomic keyboard and the other tools you use at work every day. If even one thing's off—the shirt too loose, the shoes too tight, the tools don't connect—your entire balance can be thrown off skew.

For men's fashion needs, there's Hugh & Crye. They make sure their customers have the best fit for their dress and casual shirts.

Their fashion is balanced perfectly, but they still needed help on the work tools side. For those pesky eCommerce business problems, founder and CEO Pranav Vora relies on app automator Zapier.

About Hugh & Crye

Hugh & Crye was founded to own the space between ill-fitted, mass-produced shirts and expensive, custom-tailored shirts. More than that, the team at Hugh and Crye wants to make dressing well accessible, offering fitting guides and blog posts about what exactly makes a well-fitted shirt.

With Hugh & Crye bringing a better fit to customers, Pranav looked to Zapier to give their tools a the same treatment. Their "aha!" moment? "When we saw that we could seamlessly integrate what we thought to be very important but disparate apps for our business, Shopify and Mailchimp," says Pranav.

Create MailChimp Subscribers from Shopify Orders

At Hugh & Crye, Pranav and his team wanted to know more about their customers—was this a first purchase or a fifth?—and they didn't have the bandwidth to manually track a customer's life cycle, especially as it related to purchases. That information was vital to the email campaigns Pranav wanted to create.

These campaigns were dependent on how many purchases a customer had made. For first-time purchases, Pranav has a series of emails welcoming the customer to the Hugh & Crye family. Return customers have their own campaign. There's also a series of emails for when an order ships.

"Before, it was a very manual process to export data and then segment it and get it ready for our email marketing in MailChimp," he explains.

So instead of manually handling the data, the Hugh & Crye team now use Zapier and its filters to segment customers from Shopify and add them to the correct campaign in MailChimp.

Hugh & Crye's Tools

The Workflows

For the folks at Hugh & Crye, segmenting customers based on their purchase history transforms the user experience with the brand. Powering their segments are a few simple Zaps (our term for automated workflows) that pair Shopify and MailChimp.

Any time Hugh & Crye receives a paid order in Shopify, Zapier takes that customer's order information and runs it through a filter, looking for specifics, like whether this customer already exists, the total orders from this customer, and anything else that would inform their email campaign. Then, Zapier adds the customer as a subscriber to a specific list in MailChimp.

The team repeats this process with different Zaps, each one putting a different type of customer in their own list.

If you want to add your paid customers from Shopify as subscribers in MailChimp, give this Zap a try:

And check out a few of our favorite Shopify and MailChimp Zaps, too, to get more ideas on how you can automate manual processes:

With Zapier powering their customer segments and email campaigns, Pranav and the team can focus on all the things that matter to their brand: creating a better product, offering the best experience for their customers, and spending time away from work, with family and friends.

Want to ditch the manual work like Hugh & Crye? Give Zapier a try for free.

All images courtesy of Hugh & Crye.