Group creation and maintenance
Don’t put clients into two Groups. That is the first suggestion we can offer. Clients in multiple groups will cause you numerous problems later when the list grows and you are trying to manage your campaigns, your mailing list tiers, and manage allocations/releases.
Groups should be managed as a resource for segmenting wine releases, not to “tag” customers with notes. You should save your notes for customers in the Notes sections of the Client account, or the Tags option.
Don’t create a group called “Inactive”, as a way to track clients that you don’t email anymore. On the right side of the screen in a client account there is a section called Contact Info. Click the edit button and all the way at the bottom is a selection for Account Status, “Active” or “Inactive”.
Therefore, if a client is in a tiered allocation Group and they don’t buy or respond anymore to emails, remove them from that group, let them float “ungrouped” and mark their account as as “Inactive” as described above.
Groups can have a discount applied. This helps if you want to create a friends and family group or a trade group. After creating a Group, you can always click into it and in the upper right corner click the button - ‘Edit Group Details’. At the bottom there is a Discount cell which you can define the percentage off rate for those people in that group.
Group suggestions - Most common and effective
Test - Create a Test group and put your personal/work email addresses here, and that of your co-workers as well, so you can run through your upcoming offers before launching, test your allocations for groups, and practice segmenting, to make sure everything is running smoothly before your customers receive the official launch notice. If you can make everything run smoothly in a Test group, you can copy those parameters into the official customer groups.
Tier One - Start with one to two tiers at the beginning, and lets hope after the years go by, that you get up to five or six tiers. It doesn't hurt to spell out the numbers as well. This will help accuracy in Campaign Monitor when creating segments and syncing these Groups. From the start, establish Tier One as your highest honor. In the beginning, populate it with all your clients and let it become the spot in the years to come for your best clients. As some customers in Tier One slow down their buying you can move them down to Tier Two. Tier One members will become the people that always buy as much as possible over the years, so they will receive the best allocation (all wines, highest quantities available). Tier Two, Three, etc will get fewer wine options and/or less quantity. Once those two or three groups are populated with enough people to buy up all your available production, you will have to start a Waiting List!
Waiting List - Once you reach a point where you have more potential customers than wine to sell you will need to start a Waiting List group. As clients fall away or you increase production you can shift people in and out of tiers, graduating people from the Waiting List.
When you create a Group, below the group name is a cell called Description. Use that and be detailed. Fill in a reason as to who the people are in this Group, or write why they are there.
Now, to make sure you are populating the Groups/Tiers when people sign up via your website, go to the main Settings page. Under Customers it will show all the Groups you have built. Select the Group that you want new customers to land in automatically when they sign up on your website.
**Very Important**—You can start with automatically populating people to Tier One. Once that is full you can switch it to Tier Two. When you are ready to start populating the Waiting List, jump back into that Customers section of Settings and make the change from Tier One/Two to Waiting List.