The Groups page is tightly linked to the Customers page. As you will see on the main Groups page, the top left tabs bar shows in blue text your Purchasers (sorted by most dollars spent), Subscribers (sorted by most recent sign up), and Groups listing.
Groups provide a way to organize customers into sections/segments, most often for allocation purposes. These groups can be synced with Campaign Monitor for accurate segmentation.
Before reading on, you may want to also read our Best Practices article on Group creation and naming, titled Valuable Insights for Group Creation.
On the main Groups page, the list of Groups you create will then show details among several columns:
ID: This group ID number is used for many of the spreadsheet uploading needs, when shifting large blocks of clients from one group to another (more on that later).
Allocation Name: Basically the Group name.
Customers: The number of customers in the individual Groups will populate in this column.
Status: Active or Inactive. This setting allows you to turn the allocation on or off, making it visible or not to your customers when they log into their accounts.
Allocation Start and Allocation End (PDT): These are the dates and times you set in which the allocation period will start and end. Kind of another level of the Active status so that you don’t have to manually turn an allocation on or off. You can set up all the details of the allocation in advance, mark it as Active, but it will only be visible between the dates you dictate.
View Customers button (this will appear after you create a Group): This will take you to the details page for that Group, the same as clicking the blue text Group in the Allocation Name column.
Edit button (this will appear after you create a Group): This will take you to the Group allocation parameters where you setup active status, dates, messaging, products, and discounts.
To create a new Group, on this main page, use the “New Group” button in the upper right hand corner. A window will appear allowing you to create a unique name, based on how you want to tier and segment your customers. After naming, the window will disappear and you will be brought to the details page for that Group.
Now you are ready to assign customers to your new group.
You can do this three ways:
Individual Group Shifting: Go into an individual Customer account. About a quarter of a screen scroll down you will see several tabs in blue text (Profile & Notes (default), Special Instructions, Order History, etc). Click the Groups tab and you will see all the Groups you have created. Select which Group you want this customer to be in. You can have a customer in more than one group, but we really, highly, passionately don’t recommend that. Again, read about that in the Best Practices article, titled Valuable Insights for Group Creation.
Automatic Group Designation: In the Settings>Customers section you will see all the Groups you have created. Designating one of the Groups on this page as your default will mean that any new client signing up online via your website will be put into that Group. Plus, any admin user creating a new customer account in Figure will automatically put this customer into that default Group.
Bulk Upload Group Shifting: As your list grows it is not efficient to individually change hundreds of customers from one group to another. The Figure app has an upload/update feature for doing bulk modifications to a customer’s Group selection. There are two ways you can do this:
Group page - Click on any Group and that will produce a page listing all the customers in that Group. By the left side of the screen you can click the top check box next to the ID column to select all the customers in that Group. Then click the “Choose an action” drop down menu and you will see an option that says “Group-Move” and it will then list all your available Groups below. By selecting a Group name under the “Group-Move” area, all those customers selected will be removed from their current Group put into the Group you select.
>>This comes in handy if you have a Waiting List group and you want to “promote” all Waiting List people into a group that will be offered an upcoming allocation.
>>This also comes in handy with Groups that don’t have too many customers, when you are “demoting” people to a lower tiered group. In this Group page list, the three right columns will show the customer’s last order date, their number of orders overall, and their total dollars spent. As you scroll down the list, if you are seeing a large number of customers with no entry for a “Last Order” and zeros under the Orders and Totals columns you will know they haven’t been buying across several offers by then looking at the Joined column. If the date under the Joined column is one or two years old, you now know those customers have seen multiple offers without buying. Therefore, select the check box to the left of their names and then do the same process mentioned above, “Choose an action>Group-Move”.
Export Group Data - If you need to do more in depth analysis to make selective adjustments of customers, and if you have a very large number of customers in your Groups, you can export the client list in the Group to a spreadsheet. Once you click into a Group, on the left side just below the ‘Choose an Action’ drop down menu you will select the single checkbox at the top. This will select all the customers in this group. Then click the ‘Choose an Action’ drop down menu and select ‘Customer Data Export’. This .csv spreadsheet download will allow you to sort and filter columns to determine the customers in that Group who are buying the most (promotion potential) and who are buying the least (demotion potential). Be aware that if you make formatting adjustments to a .csv file they will not be saved after you close the spreadsheet. You will need to save the export as a .xlsx file to save formatting changes.
>>You can then prepare a new MS-DOS Comma Separated .csv spreadsheet that will allow you to re-upload large lists to change/move customers from Group to Group. In this new spreadsheet for upload, the Column A header should be “id” and column B header should be “group_id”. After you complete the sort and filter of your main Groups export to determine which customers need changes you can then copy/paste the client “id” column to the re-upload spreadsheet under column A. Then for the “group_id” column you would get that group id number from the main Groups page. The farthest left column on the screen shows the Group ID numbers. Fill in that number on the re-upload sheet under column B.
>>To upload this new spreadsheet, you go to the Customers page in your Figure app and in the upper right corner of the screen is the “Import” drop down button. Select Groups and follow the process to choose your file and upload.
**Helpful Hint**—If you have several thousand customers you are shifting from one group to another, you can always test this upload process first with only one customer in the spreadsheet. Go through the process above to see if it works properly — shifting the customer out of one group and into another. Then you can confidently do it for real with your larger list.
On the main Groups page, if you click into a group to see the list of customers, in the upper right area you will see three buttons - “New Group”, “Edit Group Details”, and “Export Group Data (# of records) [.csv]”
New Group will allow you to create another group. Having this button here allows for fast creation of tiered groups, like if you want to quickly make groups like Tier One, Tier Two, Tier Three, etc...and then populate details later.
Edit Group Details will take you to a secondary page for the Group you just created, allowing you to enter all the parameters of a basic allocation offering. Don’t forget to use the “Save Changes” button when creating your allocation details. Here is the list of Group Details you can edit:
>>Details section>Allocation Name: The name of the group.
>>Details section>Description: This can help in advising/reminding co-workers and yourself of the parameters for customers being in this group or tier level.
>>Status section>The active/Inactive drop down selector will allow you to make the allocation visible for clients when they sign into their account. It also provides the start and end dates for when you would like that allocation to commence or stop. For example, you can set up all the details of the allocation in advance, mark it as Active, but it will only be visible between the dates you dictate.
>>Messaging section>When a customer logs into their account, this text cell provides you a chance to introduce any key points about the release like start and end dates, wines offered, vintage notes, shipping information, etc.
>>Product Offering>You will see a drop down tab that says “Select to add products”. This provides a list of all the products you have available. Select one product and then enter the max amount of bottles customers are allowed to buy in the Purchase cell, then enter the max amount of bottles they are allowed to request in the Wish cell (Available where it applies—some sites don’t support all features). Then click the “Add to Allocation” button. This wine will then appear in the grid above, showing the wine name and the overall stock available in the product. On the far right of the product you will see the three horizontal lines (hamburger) which if you click and hold will allow you to move it up and down to reorder the list of wines should you have multiple products in the offer.
>>If you need to adjust quantities of bottles per product you can do that, and just click the blue button “Update Allocation Quantities”.
>>Product Offering>Cart Minimum for Checkout: This allows you to set a minimum number of bottles clients must purchase.
>>Discount Rate>We see this used most often when wineries or wine retailers set up “Trade” or “Friends & Family” groups.