Getting a Detailed Look at Your Customers: Users Insights Review

As giant retailers like Amazon or established brands like Macy’s have grown to dominate eCommerce sales, small retailers can have a tough time determining how to carve out a unique selling proposition in the eCommerce arena. For many independent merchants, competing on price with titans like Amazon or Walmart is almost impossible, so many turn to dominating a specific niche (like Tattly for temporary tattoos), or building a reputation for fantastic customer support (as Zappos did before being acquired).

As competition grows among eCommerce stores, many merchants realize they need provide great customer service on top of quality or speciality products to be able to charge enough to be profitable. Since quality customer service has become non-negotiable, using tools to manage the customer service process can help merchants deliver on service as well as product quality.

Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can help you track information about your users and personalize your interactions to provide great service throughout the customer lifecycle. Not only can you add notes or specific information about users, but you can also analyze user data for improved support and communication.

We’ll take a look at the Users Insights plugin ($99+) today, which can help WordPress eCommerce merchants improve their customer service and communication.

Users Insights is a CRM tool that fits right into your WordPress dashboard to let you analyze user data on your eCommerce site. You can search user data and filter it based on several criteria to get insights into customer and user behavior.

You can select almost any user data or choose certain purchasing behaviors to filter your customer lists, letting you track behavior internally to provide better customer service, or export customers to CSV based on the data you’ve selected to segment customers for email lists.

One of the best features about Users Insights is that it works seamlessly with tons of popular platforms so that you can access data from WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or other plugins in your customer list.

We’ll take a look at specific strategies you can use to both track customers and segment or personalize communication, then take a detailed look at how Users Insights can work with your eCommerce platform to analyze valuable customer data.

The major features of Users Insights center around the customer list that you’ll find under the “Users Insights” menu when the plugin is activated. From this list, you can manage your users, add data or notes to a customer, filter your users lists by several criteria, or export your customers to CSV (even a filtered view of customers).

You can filter on WordPress core data for your users, such as the date the user registered an account. This could help you, for example, to send “birthday”-type emails, such as “thanks for registering a year ago!” with a coupon at the beginning of each month.

Filter by Registration Date

You’ll also be able to filter by eCommerce fields, such as the product purchased. This can let you see who has purchased a membership or subscription product, who has purchased a product that’s since been recalled, or generate a list of customers to email about a particular purchase.

Filter by Purchased Products

If you have multiple conditions you want to search your users for, you can apply multiple filters at the same time. This can let you search by order count and product purchase simultaneously; search by total spent and user role; or combine any other data to get a drilled-down list of customers that meet these criteria.

Use Multiple Filters

Once you have the list of customers you want, you can export this list to CSV. The CSV file will include the fields you have visible at the time (which can be adjusted with the “eye” icon). This can let you export a pared-down list of name, email, and a couple helpful fields to generate a mailing list for your email software of choice, or put together a detailed export for marketing campaigns or shipping sample products.

User Export

Exports are one of the top ways you can segment your customer communication, as you can build email lists that center around your Users Insights filters to target specific customers. You can also personalize emails by using your Users Insights data as fields in your emails (such as merge tags in MailChimp emails). For example, if you add “Total Spent” to exports, you could then import this data into MailChimp as a subscriber field, and use a merge tag to include it in email content.

Customer Information

If you want to see information about a specific customer, you can click the customer’s username to get an overview of the customer’s details.

This will show you customer data, customer activity, and let you add customer notes for internal tracking. If you have geolocation enabled, you can also see this customer’s location in the customer details.

Geolocation

Speaking of geolocation, you can get information on where your customers are coming from. Aside from seeing the customer location information the profile page, you can also filter by location data, such as the country, city, and region (state / province).

One of my favorite things, however, is the “heatmap” of customer locations. You can view this by clicking the “globe” icon on the right above your users table.

This tells you where your customers are coming from, along with a count for each region. You can drill down into regions to see where customers come from in more detail. This can be an excellent tool for targeting trade shows, partnerships with retailers, or possible brick-and-mortar locations based on where your customers are located.

You can even see a heatmap for a filtered view, so you can target locations of only your top customers.

As filters are the most powerful tool in Users Insights, let’s take a look at a couple filters you can use to segment your customers.

Get a List of Product Reviewers
For most eCommerce plugins, WordPress comments are used to add product reviews. As a result, we can use a comments filter to let us find customers who have frequently reviewed products. As these customers have shown that they’re willing to write reviews, they’re great customers to target with sample products or new catalog additions to get those initial reviews for your products.

You can filter based on the number of comments a customer has had to get customers who have frequently engaged on your site. I’d also recommend that you filter for your “customer” role, as your site admins or shop manager most likely have a lot of comments, too 🙂

Filter by Comments

While this may have some blog comments mixed in with product reviews, it’s a pretty good starting point for our list of avid reviewers. If you wanted to pare this list down further, you could view the customer data for each person on this list to see how many of those comments are on products vs other content types.

Get a List of Inactive Customers
Users Insights has some tips on finding your inactive users in their resources, but I typically define an “inactive customer” as someone who hasn’t purchased in a given time period. You can filter your customer list by the last order date so that you have a list of customers whose last purchase was before a cut-off date.

You could then email these customer to re-engage them or inform them about new products or sales they may be interested in.

Get a List of Failed Payments
Sometimes payments fail, and customers may not always be aware of the failure, depending on which payment method was used, or they may not have been paying close attention. You could email the customers who have failed orders each month to try to recover these orders over time.

A filter based on order status will let you export a list of customers who have at least one failed order.

While we mentioned previously that geolocation can be enabled and this is a useful piece of data for your customers, it’s not the only piece of additional data you can add to your customer records for internal use or segmentation.

Users Insights gives you the ability to create user groups for your customers. This can let you categorize your users, such as grouping together VIPs or loyal customers. You can use a color indicator for the group, which can be displayed in your users list for quick reference.

Manage User Groups

You can also create custom user fields to add additional data to customer records. This data can be completed by your team during customer service interactions, and this data can then be included in your user exports, making custom fields a great tool for email personalization.

User Custom Fields

Groups and custom fields can easily be edited while viewing a customer’s information.

Users Insights can also add customer data from several eCommerce and membership plugins, such as Ultimate Member, bbPress, and BuddyPress. We’ll take a detailed look at how it works with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and Gravity Forms.

You can activate the WooCommerce Module under “Users Insights > Module Options” to seamlessly connect Users Insights to WooCommerce. This lets you add eCommerce fields into your Users Insights filters, making it easier to segment customers based on purchase behavior.

When this module is active, you’ll see a few new filter options for WooCommerce:

• Orders — Filter customers based on the number of orders they’ve placed
• Last Order — Filter customers based on the date of their last order
• Ordered Products –Filter customers based on whether or not they’ve purchased a particular product
• Orders status — Filter customers based on whether or not they have an order with a given status

However, there’s one field I think is missing there that I’d love to use with WooCommerce: lifetime value (although I hear this is coming soon!). Until this is available in the plugin, you can add the amount of money spent in total by a customer fairly easily using a custom field. Add a field with the key _money_spent to add this to your filtering options.

Add Customer Spend Total

This will now let you filter by the total amount spent by a customer, making it easy to get a list of your VIPs or most valuable customers over time.

Filter by Total Spent

Easy Digital Downloads can easily connect Users Insights to the purchase history by enabling the built-in EDD module. When this module is active, the Easy Digital Downloads filtering options will be available:

• EDD Orders — Filter customers based on the number of orders they’ve placed
• EDD Lifetime Value — Filter customers based on the total amount spent with your store
• EDD Last Order Date — Filter customers based on the date of their last order
• EDD Ordered Products –Filter customers based on whether or not they’ve purchased a particular product
• EDD Orders Status — Filter customers based on whether or not they have an order with a given status

The built-in support for lifetime value is a great tool to target your best customers.

Filter by Total Spend

When Gravity Forms is active on your site, you can leverage a couple new filtering options by enabling the Gravity Forms module. This lets you filter based on whether or not a user has completed a form.

This is helpful to see if surveys or feedback forms have been submitted by certain customers.

However, Users Insights is most powerful when paired with the User Registration add-on (available for Gravity Forms professional license holders). User fields that are part of your registration forms will automatically be added to the Users Insights custom fields and filters, letting you filter your users based on the responses they’ve submitted.

This is great if you register wholesale customers, members, or other site users via Gravity Forms User Registration. Any fields you’ve added to this form can be included in customer data without additional effort, letting you get tons of personalization data with every sign up.

Every Users Insights purchase ($99+) includes a year of updates and support, so you can get support via email for any questions or issues.

I also found the resources on the Users Insights site helpful for questions and new ideas. The features list answers a lot of general questions about how the plugin, filters, and integration modules work.

For more advanced usages or specific questions, the answers collection has several example set ups that walk you through how to get the filters you’d want.

Users Insights ($99+) provides a helpful tool for WordPress sites and eCommerce stores specifically to get data on customers and to export customers for improved communication via segmentation and personalization. Using the built-in eCommerce integrations, you can filter customers in several different ways to get accurate lists of customers:

• Get lists of customers who have purchased a particular product, as these customers can be notified of recalls, launches for similar products, or solicited for product feedback
• Get a list of VIP customers who’ve spent a certain amount of money with you to potentially send thank you cards or gifts
• Use geolocation to see where your VIP customers are location, or to get a feel for where your customers come from overall
• Get a list of avid reviewers who have left multiple product reviews and solicit reviews for your newest products with samples or gifts
• Get a list of inactive customers who have not purchased with your store yet this year to win them back (perhaps with a discount or sale notification)

You can also leverage the “notes” tool to ensure that your customer service team tracks data on refunds or customer interactions. This helps you improve customer service alongside of customer communication.

I would have loved to see the ability to take bulk actions while viewing users, such as the ability to add all users to a group. This would be especially useful for filtered views — for example, to add everyone with a total spend above $500 to a “VIP” group.

The only downside to bear in mind is that the data you’re viewing or exporting is only for registered users, so guest customer data will not be tracked. While most of the time you’re managing registered customers, this may not give you complete lists for some views or filters, such as lists based on product purchases (as guest orders are not considered).

Overall, the Users Insights plugin is dead-simple to use, and the filters, user groups, and custom fields give you lots of handy tools for customer management to improve your service and expand customer communication.