Target: Customer Segment

Use this target in Web and Dialog activities, Introduced in Feature Pack 2 and in search rules, to target customers who belong to specific customer segments. By using the Customer Segment target, you can personalize marketing activities and search rules so that they are more relevant to the target audience.

WebSphere Commerce Professional WebSphere Commerce Enterprise Dialog activities are available only in the Professional and Enterprise editions of WebSphere Commerce.

Here is an example of a Web activity that uses the Customer Segment target to display different ads in the same e-Marketing Spot, depending on who is viewing the Apparel category page:

If the customer is in the Female customers customer segment, recommend the Dress sale ad.
If the customer is in the Male customers customer segment, recommend the Suit sale ad.
If the customer is not in the Male customers or the Female customers customer segment, display the Free shipping ad.

Here is another example. This time, it is a Dialog activity that uses the Customer Segment target to ensure that a marketing email reaches the right audience:

When a customer registers, if that customer belongs to the High-Income Earners segment, then send the customer an email that advertises a new line of high-end audio equipment.

Customer segments you can use for this target

For the Customer Segment target, you can specify any customer segment that is already created in Management Center. You can populate customer segments the following ways:

Use the customer segment properties view in the Marketing tool to define a customer segment by using any combination of the supported attributes, such as Gender, Current age according to supplied birth date, or Amount spent since registration. For the customer segment to contain customers, your store must gather and store customer data for the customer segment attributes you select. For example, if you want to populate a customer segment that contains male customers over 40, your store must gather and store age and gender information about customers. Typically, a store gathers this information through the registration and account update processes. For a complete list of supported attributes you can use to define a customer segment, see Creating a customer segment.
Use a Web or Dialog activity to dynamically populate a customer segment that you created that is based on individual customer behavior. See Action: Add To or Remove From Customer Segment.
If your company uses IBM Digital Analytics, formerly known as Coremetrics Analytics, you can use a IBM Digital Analytics based customer segment. See Creating and updating IBM Digital Analytics based customer segments.

Prerequisite for using this target

Make sure that your site is configured to support the Management Center marketing features.

Guidelines for using this target

When you set up this target, you can specify one or more customer segments, and then specify that the customer must belong to:

Any of the customer segments
All of the customer segments

Alternatively, you can specify that the customer does not belong to any of the customer segments.