CONTENTS
Why might I want to export my customer’s details?
Pros and Cons of exporting via Admin > Customer Search
Pros and cons of Admin > Customer Search
Sales > Sales Report and Mail Shot
Sales Report and Mail Shot for exporting all customers’ details
Sales Report and Mail Shot for exporting customers who have bought certain items
Sales Report and Mail Shot for emailing customers directly from Cybertill
Pros and Cons of Sales Report & Mail Shot
User Defined Data Export option
Introduction
This manual will take you through the features in Cybertill which you can use to export details about your customers (name, address, email etc.) into a CSV spreadsheet file.
Why might I want to export my customer’s details?
It’s often useful to do this if you want to get in touch with them.
If you can get your customer’s names, addresses and emails into a spreadsheet, you could then use that spreadsheet in conjunction with other computer programs to print out a letter addressed to all those customers, or send an email out to them all, with very little effort. (Example: Microsoft Word’s “Mail Merge” feature can be used to print letters, and Mailchimp is a popular solution for sending emails.)
As to why you might want to get in touch with them in the first place, there could be many reasons for that. Perhaps you’re about to start a sale and want to let your customers know. Perhaps you’ve just got in the latest season’s stock for one of your top brands and want to tell customers who’ve bought that brand in the past. Maybe there’s been a product recall, and you want to inform all the people who’ve bought that product from you recently.
Let’s consider each of the tools you can use to get your customers’ details into a spreadsheet in turn.
Admin > Customer Search
One of the simplest ways to export your customer’s details is via Customer Search.
- Within your Admin menu, locate to the Customer Management section.
- Select Customer search.
The Customer Search page will open, containing multiple filter options.
If you only wanted to export certain groups of customers, you could use these “filter” boxes to restrict which people’s details you export here. For example, if you only wanted to bring up customers whose accounts were created within a certain date range, or who lived in a certain city, or had agreed to be on an email mailing list, there are filters on this screen to select all of that.
On the other hand, if you didn’t want to filter and simply wanted to export all customers, don’t select anything.
- Instead, go straight to clicking the Search button at the bottom left.
You might need to then wait for a few moments for the system to compile the list.
Eventually, you’ll be presented a list of the first 20 customers it found:
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll see two things of interest there.
a) the total number of customers you have on file, and
b) an option to Export them
- Click the Export link.
When you do so, an Export page should appear, containing several fields.
Here, if you wished to, you could choose exactly what pieces of customer information you want to appear in the export.
Unless you tell it otherwise here, the system will by default be set to export everything it can about your customers; all the tick boxes down the left of the screen will be left ticked. If there are certain fields which you know you won’t need in your spreadsheet,
- untick them at the left.
Example: if you have never used the Customer Group field before, you may as well take the tick out of the “Customer Group” box.
If you’re not sure which of these fields you’ll need and which you won’t, it might be best to leave everything ticked. (It’s better to have more info than you need than not enough.)
- Scroll down at the bottom of this screen, you’ll find an Export button.
- Click to proceed
The next screen you’re taken to will look like this:
Unless you understand these options on sight, it’s probably best if you leave them alone. (The defaults will almost certainly work fine.)
- Click the Export button.
You should get your spreadsheet file. Depending on what operating system (i.e. what version of Windows) you’re using, it’ll probably ask you if you want to “open or save” the file:
If you select to open the file, you should find you’ve got all your customer’s details in a spreadsheet looking something like this:
Your data has successfully been exported.
Resetting the filters
If you used the Customer Search tool a short while ago, you might find that when you go back to Admin > Customer Search again, instead of taking you to the “filters” screen, the system will simply list the results of the previous search.
If this happens to you, and you want to change the filters (i.e. change what you were searching for),
- click Filtered results at the very top of the screen.
This will bring up the current filters in a pop-up window.
This box will contain most (albeit not all) of the possible filters that you can use.
- Have a look down this and see if the filters you want to apply appear here.
- If they do, select them, and then click the Filter button at the very bottom. (You’ll probably need to scroll down to find it.)
If the option you want to filter by doesn’t appear in this pop-up window, follow this procedure to return the Customer Search screen all the way back to how it was when you first ran it:
- Click the Reset button at the bottom
When the page reloads,
- go back to Admin
- Click into Customer Search once again.
This time, it should bring up the full “filters” page with all the available options in it (just like it did the first time you went into Customer Search). There will be a few more filter options on this page than there were in the pop-up window.
Pros and Cons of exporting via Admin > Customer Search
This export tool is quite simple to use, and there are lots of filters you can apply, meaning it can be quite useful for focusing on specific groups of customers. It also contains a lot of information, such as names, email addresses, dates of account
creation, account balance and contact preferences (amongst many others).
Probably its biggest downside, though, is that it doesn’t pull out customers’ postal addresses very well. If you take a look in the “Default Address” column (normally column C), you’ll find that it only retrieves the customer’s postcode and first line of their address, and furthermore, they aren’t in separate columns. Consequently, this export isn’t very useful if you want to send letters to your customers; you’ll probably need
- more of their address, and
- for each line of the address to be in a separate column, to be able to do that.
Also, it doesn’t make any reference to what your customers have bought or how much they’ve spent. If you wanted to send out “targeted” marketing emails/letters which are tailored a bit more towards your customers’ purchasing history, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
Sales > Customer Spend Report
The Customer Spend Report is a great way to see which of your customers have spent the most money with you. To find this report,
▪ access the Sales menu.
Within the Reports section,
▪ select Customer Spend Report
When the page loads, it contains 5 filters options:
So, you can choose to focus on sales in a Location(s) if you wished. You can also set the Date range that you want to look across. You even have filters for Customer Groups or Customer Type, so if you wanted to focus specifically on retail or trade customers (for example), you can do so.
Upon clicking Generate to run the report, you’ll probably see results like these:
This report is quite wide and depending on how big your screen is you might need to scroll to the right to see the last few columns.
As you can see from the example above, it includes your customers’ names, emails and postal addresses in the results (with each line of the postal address in a separate column).
Note the Total and Number of Sales columns at the right.
- Total is the total amount of money the customer has spent in your shop(s) over your chosen period.
- Number of Sales is the number of transactions the customer has been involved with.
Note: It is not the quantity of items the customer has purchased, but the quantity of transactions they’ve done; they might have purchased 200 different items, but if they were all purchased within one single transaction, it will only say “1” here.
By default, this report will be ordered to show the customers with the highest total spend at the top, and work down to the lowest spenders at the bottom.
Note: If a customer hasn’t spent any money with you, they won’t appear in this report at all. It’ll only show customers who have been active within your chosen date range.
All this data can then be exported out into a CSV file by clicking the “Export to CSV” button at the top right.
Pros and cons of Admin > Customer Search
It’s very simple to use, and it’s designed specifically for finding your highest-spending customers. If you want to identify who they are, and perhaps reward them somehow, this report will do the trick.
Consequently, it is very specialised, and it isn’t suitable for pulling out more “general” customer details. If you wanted to contact all your customers about your latest promotions, for example, this export won’t be of much help.
Also, for this particular report, it’s important to note that you can’t restrict it to only include customers on your mailing list. There isn’t any way you can set it to exclude customers who have “opted out” of being sent marketing letters/emails. So, you should be wary about contacting everyone that this export produces without double-checking that they’ve consented to being contacted.
Sales > Sales Report and Mail Shot
From within the Sales menu,
▪ locate to the Reports section.
▪ Select Sales Report And Mail Shot
It report is excellent both for
a) exporting all your customers’ details, and for
b) exporting just the customers who have bought certain things within a specified date range.
Also, uniquely, this option contains a facility to let you send emails to your customers directly from the Cybertill system.
Let’s consider each of its features in turn:
_Toc22050"Sales Report and Mail Shot for exporting all customers’ details
Upon clicking into the Sales Report and Mail Shot screen, you’ll see a page full of filter options:
About half way down, there is a tick box named All Customers. Put a tick in that box.
Note that just underneath it, there are filters for Spam mail, Third party mail and Post mail. So, if you wanted to only bring up the customers who’ve consented to you sending them email, for example, you should probably tick the Spam mail box accordingly.
Leave all the other options alone and go straight to the Generate button at the bottom left.
After a few moments’ pause, it should produce a ‘results’ page looking something like this:
There will be a lot of columns of information here, and unless your computer screen is incredibly wide you’ll need to scroll right to see them all. The crucial Account Number, First Name, Last Name, Address and Email columns will be first, followed by columns containing a wealth of other customer data such as their Account Status, Loyalty Points Balance, Credit Limit, Date/Time their account was opened and their Registration Location, to name but a few.
- If you scroll to the very far right, you’ll find an Export to CSV button in the header bar.
- Click Export to CSV to pull all this information out of the system and into a CSV spreadsheet.
Sales Report and Mail Shot for exporting customers who have bought certain items
If you want to be a little more specific in which customers you’re exporting,
- start by returning to the filters page.
This time, instead of selecting the All Customers box,
- leave it unticked.
- Select a Date Range that you wish to look across.
Example: if you wanted to find which customers who have bought certain products within the last six months, you’d need to set the “from” date to six months ago, and the “to” box to today. Or, if you wanted to bring up all the customers who have ever bought certain products, set the “from” date to as far back a date as you can, then set the “to” date to today.
As well as setting the dates, you’ll also need to tell the system which products it should be looking for sales of. You’ve got options just below the “Date” filter for doing that:
The easiest two to work with here are Brand and Category. If you wanted to see customers who’ve bought products of a certain brand, or products that you keep in a certain category,
- simply click into the Brand or Category box as appropriate, find the brand/category, and tick it.
Note that if you have hundreds of Brands or Categories, you might be able to find the one you want a little easier if you make use of the “Enter Keywords” box:
If you type a phrase into that box, the system will hide all the brands/categories which do not contain that phrase. Take this example:
Here, the system is only listing the brand names that contain the phrase “om” – namely “Capcom”, “From Software” and “Home”.
The Product List filter is less broad. You’d use this if, instead of using an entire Brand or Category, you wanted to cherrypick a selected product or products to focus on. (So, you’d probably want to use this option if a certain item had to be recalled, and you wanted to inform your customers.)
To make use of it, you will probably be best served by clicking the “…” button:
This should bring up a kind of search “wizard”:
Use this tool to search for the item(s) you want to focus on.
Eventually, you’ll get to a point where you can highlight the item in question,
▪ then click the Finish button:
(Note that when you’re at this stage, you can highlight several items at once; try either clicking and dragging or holding down the CTRL button on your keyboard as you click each item in turn.)
Upon clicking Finish, you should see that the name of your item now appears in the box just to the left of the “…” box, like this:
(If you selected several items, it might just say “3 selected” or words to that effect.)
Alternatively, instead of using the “…” wizard, advanced users could use the “or Upload a CSV File” option instead:
If there are a number of different items you want the system to look at, you could enter all of their itemRef codes into “column A” of a spreadsheet file, save it as a CSV, and then upload it here. (This might come in handy if you wanted to search for people who have purchased anything from a list of different products that don’t all belong to the same brand or category.)
After;
- setting the date range to look at, and
- specifying the products to look at,
▪ click the Generate button at the bottom.
Note: before “Generating”, do consider whether you should tick the “Spam email” filter, or any of the other “have they consented?” filters, as appropriate.
The results that come out will be very similar to those in the previous chapter, albeit with a couple of extra columns at the start for Item Ref and Item Name:
They will tell you which of the items out of your selected few that customer purchased.
Note: if they bought more than one of those items over the selected date, it will show the item which they bought first in that period.
You’ll also find there’s an extra column with a header of Frequency some way in from the left:
This will tell you the quantity of transactions over that period in which the customer bought at least one of your selected items. (Emphasis on “quantity of transactions”; they might have purchased 700 units of an item, but if they bought them all within the same one transaction, the “Frequency” column will show “1”.)
You’ll find the usual Export to CSV button if you scroll all the way over to the top right.
▪ Click this to get the data off the screen and into a spreadsheet.
Sales Report and Mail Shot for emailing customers directly from Cybertill
Whenever you’re looking at the “results” page for the Sales Report and Mail Shot, you might see a button at the bottom left of the screen marked Email.
- Click this and an email form window will appear:
You could use this form to send a plain text email out to all the customers listed here.
You’d need to enter your own email address in the From box, then write a Subject and a Body (as per the usual email requirements).
Note: this window will be quite small by default. Depending on whether your web browser is compatible, you might be able to make the Body field larger by clicking and dragging the symbol.
After filling these boxes in,
▪ click Send.
Cybertill will then send that message out to all the customers who
- are in your report, and
- have an email address recorded against them.
Pros and Cons of Sales Report & Mail Shot
As noted above, it’s great for exporting all customers, and is fantastic for exporting only those customers who’ve bought certain products. Also, the exports it produces contain a lot of data; you can see a huge amount of information about your customers in there.
The ability to email customers directly from Cybertill is convenient and potentially very useful for retailers who aren’t comfortable with the idea of uploading a spreadsheet to another program in order to send emails.
Regarding those emails, though, it’s worth bearing in mind that emails sent from here will be plain text. You can’t set the font or font size, you can’t include any images, and you can’t add any attachments. Consequently, your customers might not find them terribly eye-catching
User Defined Data Export options
This feature is controlled by the feature@data_export Licence. Please speak to your Account Manager for more information.
Once activated, to access the User Defined Data Export,
- click back into the Sales menu.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page with within the Reports section you will find User Defined Data Export.
For retailers who have purchased the User Defined Data Export module, there are a couple of additional export options available to you. Down at the bottom of the UDDE screen, within the Customers section, you’ll find two types of export called Shop Customers and Web Customers:
- The Shop Customers option lets you export the details of all customers whose accounts were created in store (i.e. not on a website) within a specified date range.
- The Web Customers option lets you export the details of all customers who both;
a) were created through your website, and
b) consented to being on your email mailing list within a specified date range.
Note: it doesn’t matter if they’ve consented to being on your post mailing list, or to having their details shared with third parties; this export is only concerned with customers who have consented to receiving marketing emails from you.
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