Customer spending levels guide

Benefits

Building strategies based around customer spending levels is useful for the following reasons:

• Personalized Customer Engagement:
  • Encourage low spenders to make additional purchases through introductory offers, discounts, or product recommendations that align with their spending behavior.
  • Target medium spenders with cross-sell or upsell opportunities, nudging them toward higher spending categories.
  • Reward high spenders with exclusive perks or loyalty incentives to strengthen retention and increase lifetime value.
• Optimized Budget Allocation: Segmenting campaigns by spending levels ensures your marketing budget is distributed effectively, focusing resources on the most promising customer segments for growth or retention.
• Enhanced Customer Insights: Tracking customer spending patterns helps identify trends, such as seasonal behaviors or product preferences, enabling you to adjust strategies and inventory planning.
• Improved ROI on Campaigns: Tailor messaging and offers based on spending levels increases the likelihood of conversions, ensuring a higher return on your marketing investment.

What to measure

Customer spending levels can be tracked in several different ways:

• Tracking the total amount a customer spends over a given period of time.
• Tracking the average amount a customer spends with each purchase.
• Tracking spending trends over time, and whether they increase or decrease.

This guide demonstrates how to create a basic tracking configuration. It includes tracking total lifetime spending, 30-day spending, and 60-day spending windows. It then segments customers into low and high spending groups for each time frame.

After the visitors have been identified, you can take action on them through a server-side connector to your email marketing service.

Requirements

This use case requires the following:

• Tracked events: Retail
• Tealium AudienceStream

In general, the following event attributes will be helpful in tracking purchase activity to assess customer spending levels. Your actual attribute names might differ.

Attribute Name	Example value
customer_city	San Diego
customer_country	United States
customer_email	john.smith@example.com
customer_first_name	John
customer_id	8237572
customer_last_name	Smith
customer_postal_code	92101
customer_state	CA
order_currency_code	USD
order_total	2549.00
tealium_event	purchase

For more information about the data layer definition for retail, see Retail.

Required AudienceStream Attributes

Attribute Name	Type	Scope	Description
Purchased	Boolean	Visit	Indicates that a Purchase event has occurred.
Email Address	String	Visitor	Captures the email address of the visitor.
Lifetime Purchase Total	Number	Visitor	Collects the total of purchases during the visitor’s lifetime.
30 Day Purchases	Timeline	Visitor	Collects the purchases by the visitor in the past 30 days.
60 Day Purchases	Timeline	Visitor	Collects the purchases by the visitor in the past 30 days.
30 Day Purchases Running Total	Number	Visitor	Counts the total of purchases by the visitor in the past 30 days.
60 Day Purchases Running Total	Number	Visitor	Counts the total of purchases by the visitor in the past 30 days.

Step 1: Create attributes

Create the following attributes:

Create Email Address attribute

Create a string visitor attribute named Email Address with the following enrichment:

• Set to customer_email on ANY EVENT if customer_email is assigned.

Create Purchased attribute

Create a boolean visit attribute named Purchased with the following enrichments:

• Set to false on NEW VISIT.
• Set to true on ANY EVENT where tealium_event is equal (ignore case) to purchase.

Create Lifetime Purchase Total attribute

Create a number visitor attribute named Lifetime Purchase Total with the following enrichment:

• Increment Number by order_total on ANY EVENT where Purchased is true and order_total is assigned.

Create 30 Day Purchases timeline attribute

Create a timeline visitor attribute named 30 Day Purchases timeline with the following enrichments:

• Set Expiration For Timeline Events to 30 days.
• Update Timeline at the Time of event received and capture the attribute data for order_total where Purchased is true and order_total is assigned.

Create 60 Day Purchases timeline attribute

Create a timeline visitor attribute named 60 Day Purchases timeline with the following enrichments:

• Set Expiration For Timeline Events to 60 days.
• Update Timeline at the Time of event received on ANY EVENT and capture the attribute data for order_total where Purchased is true and order_total is assigned

Create 30 Day Purchases Running Total attribute

Create a number visitor attribute named 30 Day Purchases Running Total with the following enrichments:

• Set Number 30 Day Purchases Running Total to the rolling sum of order_total captured in timeline 30 Day Purchases on ANY EVENT.

Create 60 Day Purchases Running Total attribute

Create a number visitor attribute named 60 Day Purchases Running Total with the following enrichments:

• Set Number 60 Day Purchases Running Total to the rolling sum of order_total captured in timeline 60 Day Purchases on ANY EVENT.

Step 2: Create audiences

Now you can easily create audiences using the badges you’ve just created.

Create High Value Lifetime audience

Create a High Value Lifetime audience with the following conditions:

• Lifetime purchase total is greater than or equal to 5000
• Email Address is assigned

Create Low Value Lifetime audience

Create a Low Value Lifetime audience with the following conditions:

• Lifetime purchase total is less than or equal to 1000
• Email Address is assigned

Create High Value 30 Day audience

Create a High Value Lifetime audience with the following conditions:

• 30 Day Purchases Running Total is less than or equal to 1500
• Email Address is assigned

Create High Value 60 Day audience

Create a High Value Lifetime audience with the following conditions:

• 60 Day Purchases Running Total is less than or equal to 3000
• Email Address is assigned

Create Low Value 30 Day audience

Create a Low Value Lifetime audience with the following conditions:

• 30 Day Purchases Running Total is less than or equal to 100
• Email Address is assigned

Create Low Value 60 Day audience

Create a Low Value Lifetime audience with the following conditions:

• 60 Day Purchases Running Total is less than or equal to 200
• Email Address is assigned

Step 3: Configure a connector

With your attributes, badges, and audiences set up, you’re ready to connect this new audience to your email marketing tools to re-engage and convert these audiences.

Some common connectors and actions for customer spending level campaigns include:

• Adobe Campaign Classic
• Iterable: Subscribe User to a List, Upsert User action
• Marketo: Add Lead to List action
• SendGrid: Upsert Contact action

For example, you could set up the Marketo connector to add a visitor’s email address to a high-value customer spending list. Customize your connector actions to trigger only for when a visitor joins the High Value 60 Day audience or is in that audience at the end of the visit.

For more information, see Add a connector.

Delayed actions

While you can often send out an email to a user right after they achieve a particular spending level to acknowledge their achievement and encourage them to spend more, you may have a higher chance of conversion by delaying the email for your target audience. Use delayed actions to set connector action delays in Tealium and then trigger your email workflows in your vendor of choice.

We recommend that you set a delay for an hour to remarket visitors that have an interest in buying more. Also, most email marketing tools offer a feature that monitors the number of emails a customer has received so as not to overwhelm them with messages.

For detailed information about how to use delayed actions in Tealium, Delayed actions.

Next steps

This guide illustrates how to build a basic spending level-based campaign. You can increase your understanding of customer behavior by using additional attributes in your campaigns. The following table shows just some of the possible options for customer spending-related attributes:

Attribute Name	Attribute Type	Scope	Category	Notes
Average item price	Number	Visitor	Lifetime Behavior	General behavioral understanding and future use case expansions.
Favorite categories	Tally	Visitor	Lifetime Behavior	General behavioral understanding and future use case expansions.

After creating attributes and audiences, you can further enhance campaigns by integrating additional customer behavior attributes or utilizing advanced personalization features like the Tealium Moments API. For more information, see About Moments API.