One very powerful feature of WebSphere Commerce(WC) is Dynamic Customer Segments. These are customer segments that can have customers dynamically added or removed with a business rule. This means any of the targets you have in your WC tooling can be used to put customers in or out of the segment. Then, other rules can use that segment to show promotions, content, change search behavior, or change the look and feel of the site.

Here is a sample segment, let’s walk through it:

First thing you need to do is create a new customer segment in Management Center and select the “Use marketing activities to add or remove customers”. This allows business rules to add or remove customers to the segment.

Next, we want this to be valid for customers who have made a purchase in the past 30 days and have spent over $100. So the first option we need to select is on the “Purchase Details” tab:

Next, we will create a Customer Dialog Rule that will place customers who submit orders with over $100 of total value.

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Let’s walk through what this rule does:

The trigger, this makes the entire rule execute when the customer places an order

The condition, if the first target of a condition path is met the rule will continue. If not, the next branch is evaluated and executed. In this case, if the condition is not met, the  customer is removed from the segment.

The target, this will only continue with the rule if the order is at least $100.

The action, this will dynamically add the customer to the “High Roller” customer segment.

Now, we can create other web activities and dialog that can key off of that customer segment. Let’s create a few and walk through them.

The web activity below will put an advertisement on the Home page in Row 2 for all “High Roller” customers. The advertisement shows they receive 10 percent off all purchases.

This next customer dialog activity checks the High Roller customer segment every seven days and sends out an email to each customer in that segment with a 10% off promotion for being a High Roller:

This next when the customer searches for anything we have this search rule that re-arranges the default order in which products are presented by having the products in a “High Roller Sales Category” listed first if the customer is in the High Roller customer segment:

Conclusion:

The precision marketing engine in WebSphere Commerce is extremely powerful and flexible. The various options (triggers, targets, actions) allow for some pretty complex rules to be created to give each of your shoppers a unique experience. The goal of WebSphere Commerce is to provide a “live” site for each customer based on things like who they are (profile data), their purchasing behavior, external site referrals (where they came from), and their search behaviors. The contents of a WebSphere Commerce site is only limited by your imagination.