Static Customer Tagging in Shopify

In this tutorial, I will start developing the code needed to tag customers for personalization in Shopify. Specifically, I will show how to extract static tags from the Shopify Customer and Order objects and use those tags to create customer personas. We are going to cover the following

• What is Customer Tagging?
• Extracting Static Customer Tags in Shopify
• Advanced Tagging with LLMs
• Tagging Shopify Customers with GraphQL
• Where to use Customer Tags For Personalization

So what is customer tagging, and how do you extract business value from it?

What is Customer Tagging?

A customer tag is a specific attribute or property assigned to a customer within an ecommerce backend system or Email Service Provider (ESP). These tags enable businesses to categorize, filter, and tailor communications based on distinct customer characteristics. Understanding the difference between static and dynamic tags is fundamental for effective customer segmentation and personalized marketing strategies.

Static Tags

Static tags refer to customer properties that remain consistent over time. These attributes are fixed and provide a snapshot of a customer's profile at the entry point or based on historical data. Examples of static tags include:

• Age or Generation: Demographic data categorizes customers into generational groups (Baby Boomers, Millennials, etc.).
• Gender: The customer's gender.
• First Product Purchased: The initial item the customer buys from the business.
• Discount on First Product: Any discount applied to the first purchase.
• Online Purchase vs In-Store: The channel through which customers make their first purchase.
• Time from First Recorded Visit to Purchase: This is sometimes called buyer inertia. It measures the duration between a customer's first visit and purchase.
• Time-Based Cohorts: The month and year they made their first purchase.
• Number of Products in First Order: The total items included in the customer's initial order.
• Order Value in First Order: The total monetary value of the first order.

These tags help you identify foundational elements of a customer's relationship with your brand.

Dynamic Tags

In contrast, dynamic tags are attributes that evolve, reflecting the changing nature of a customer's interaction with a brand. These can include straightforward metrics and more complex, calculated, or predicted properties.