Using Squarespace as Your CRM, Part 2: Crash Course on Updated Member Profiles
I love checking out my blog’s analytics because it tells me what you are interested in learning and one of my most popular past blog posts is this one all about using Squarespace as your CRM. There have been quite a few notable updates and improvements to how customers are managed and organized so I thought an updated version was called for! All of the info in the original post is still possible, but it’s pretty quick and surface-level compared to this deep dive. Check out that post for an overview of CRM-like activities you can take on Squarespace and then come back to this post for a crash course on how to take things to the next level!
When it comes to eCommerce, there’s lots of info out there about things like pricing, shipping, inventory, and marketing but less on what really matters: customers! One of the great things about Squarespace is that it offers one place where you can see everything about your customers, mailing list subscribers, and members or donors so that you can really dig into how people are engaging with your brand.
The built-in tools in the Squarespace Profiles panel are so powerful but I think they are probably underutilized by most shop owners. In this post, we’ll dig into the details so that you can learn how to view, understand and manage your relationships with your website visitors and customers. Armed with the right information and strategies, you’ll be able to more effectively grow your business. Let’s dig in!
How to Get There & Main Panel Overview
From the home menu > PROFILES. From here you can choose to see everyone all lumped together in one list, or filter the view to see just subscribers, customers, members, or donors. Keep in mind that some people can be subscribers but not yet be customers and vice versa. You can also see on the main list who has opted in to receive marketing from you and who has created an account on your site without needing to click into anyone’s individual profile. (One thing to note throughout this post is that all info about “subscribers” assumes that you use Squarespace Email Campaigns, which you can learn more about in this post.)
Individual Profiles
Each person who has interacted with your site in one of the following ways automatically gets a profile created for them:
They make a purchase of any kind (regular product, subscription product, membership, etc.)
They create an account
They sign up for one or more of your mailing lists
They opt-in to receive marketing messages from you
They make a donation
If you click on someone’s name, you’ll get into their individual profile. This contains the following info:
Name
Email Address
An overview of engagement with your site
Tags
Notes
From inside an individual profile, you can also click on the customer or subscriber cards to get more details.
Customer Details
The Customer Details card
For people who have bought from you, a Customer Details card will be visible in their profile.
Clicking into it will show you the following info:
Total amount spent
Date of their last order
Average order amount
Total number of orders
Last addressed used
Default payment method (if they have one)
A listing of all their orders, which is clickable through to the Orders panel where you can do things like mark orders as fulfilled, resend notifications, add specific order notes, etc. (For more on what you can do there, check out this post.)
Note: if you are using Member Areas, anyone who purchases a membership will also show up as a customer! This is helpful to know because you can technically then access this person on both your “Customer” and your “Members” lists; they are just going to give you a different look at the same interaction. The Member Details card contains their membership status, the date they first became a member, how many member areas they have access to, and a list of exactly which member areas those are.
Subscriber Details
If people are subscribers, their profile will include a card just like the Customer Details card above except this one will drill into details like:
Subscriber status
How long they’ve been a subscriber
How many lists they are subscribed to
Exactly which lists they are subscribed to
From this panel, you can also manually unsubscribe someone from any of the lists they are subscribed to by clicking REMOVE.
Profile Notes
For each profile, you have the ability to add private, internal notes so just to be super clear your customers cannot see your notes!! Like I said above, you also have the ability to add notes in the Orders panel so, in order to keep things organized, you’ll want to determine for your business when notes should be added to specific orders and when they should be added to the whole profile.
For example, if a customer emailed and asked for a certain order to be left with their neighbor because they weren’t going to be home for delivery -- order note. If the same customer included some specific delivery info such as gate instructions or to always leave packages in a certain location -- profile note. Make sense?
Notes are helpful especially if you’re working with a team and want to log interactions or other info that might be helpful to document for reference later on. The thing about notes though is that they are not searchable and you can only see them by intentionally clicking into the specific profile or order info. For this reason, some things that you may want to include as notes would actually be better off as tags!
Tags
Think of tags as quick notes that many different customers, subscribers, or members have in common. These are attributes that can help you organize profiles, analyze trends, and drill into specific niches in your audience. Tags are also searchable (more on that below)!
You’ll want to use tags instead of notes any time you’re thinking about putting someone into a group along with others. So, say you have a subset of your customers that are social media influencers. You could definitely add a note to their profile indicating as such but this would be lost data. You would have no way of pulling together everyone onto one list that contained a similar note. But you could do this by adding a simple “influencer” tag!
Other ideas for tags are things like:
VIP tag - for people who are your best customers, spend the most, have placed the most orders, or have been around the longest, etc.
Tags based on preferences - for example, you could create a tag for each of your product lines or for specific brands and tag based on what customers like
Tags based on customer info - you could create a tag for each month of the year and tag customers based on their birthday month
Tags based on dates - for example, a tag for all members who signed up for a specific membership before or after a certain date
Remember that just like notes, tags aren’t visible to customers in any way!
Creating Filtered Searches
Here’s where the magic really happens and where all of the above starts to come together! With filtered searches, you’ll really start to see the power of Squarespace to help you have more insight into your audience and also better communicate with them. Filtering narrows down your list so that only see people who fit certain parameters.
Filter By Tag
One of the most obvious ways to filter your list is by tag because tags are already a way that you’ve set up as important to your business.
Filter By Other Criteria
Squarespace has provided a super robust range of built-in filters that you can use for segmentation. Here’s an overview of all the things you can filter your list by drilling down to just very specific profiles:
Whether someone has an account or not
Subscriber details:
Whether they’ve agreed to accept marketing or not
By specific mailing list
By subscriber date (users who subscribed either before or after a selected date)
Customer details:
Customers who’ve spent a specific minimum or maximum amount over their customer lifetime
Number of orders (max or min)
By last order date (customers who ordered either before or after a selected date)
By how long they’ve been a customer (either before or after a selected date)
Member details:
By specific member areas
By how long they’ve been a member (either before or after a selected date)
Combine Factors for Super Specific Searches!
Getting fancy here but you can combine any number of the factors above to create super specific segments. For example, if you want to just see people who are tagged that they love XYZ brand and haven’t ordered in a while you can do that. If you want a list of only your biggest spenders who have also opted in to receive marketing messages AND who have a May birthday? Go wild.
Creating Saved Segments from Searches
Being able to filter your list down by all sorts of criteria for your casual browsing pleasure is fun and all but before you can do anything with the info, you’ll need to save the search as a segment. When you’re satisfied with the list you’ve created by applying all the filters you want, just click on Save Segment and give it a name. Now you can refer back to it quickly any time you want and use it as the basis for email campaigns or other marketing or reporting activities.
Hint: Something to keep in mind is that if you choose a profile type (i.e. just Subscribers or Customers) in the left panel before applying search filters, the resulting segment will only include users of that type. For example, if you click on subscribers and then filter down and click Save Segment, the segment will only ever show Subscribers. This may be your intention but if not, be sure to always start your searches from the “All” list.
How to Put This Info to Work
Up until this point, sifting through all this user data has just been for you. But when you’re ready to start thinking about how to put this info to work, here’s how!
In one of my hypothetical examples above, I mentioned the idea of creating a tag for each month of the year and tagging customers based on birthday month (you could use a simple form to gather this info). As each month approaches, you could create a Saved Segment for that month, create a special coupon code and then send them a special birthday offer!
You have two options for how to do this:
Squarespace has made it super easy to jump right into drafting an email campaign where recipients will just be people that are in that segment by clicking the Create Campaign button.
If you don’t use Squarespace Email Campaigns, you can also export your profile info as a CSV and then use Google Sheets to manipulate your list and import it into your own email marketing platform.
I’m hoping that this crash course has you thinking of how you can grow your email list, cultivate your relationships with customers and build your brand by creating super-specialized content that’s catered to each of your saved segments!
Squarespace Profile FAQs
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Nope - they are there as a record of the activity of each unique email address on your site.
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Not unless they have more than one email address. It’s a user’s email address that is used to link everything together: account info, order info, subscriber info, etc. That being said if a customer placed an order with a different email address than they used to previously sign up for your email newsletter that would result in two different profiles.
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250 (that’s a lot!) - I would recommend not having more than you could reasonably scan through. Maybe a dozen or so max?
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Split answer: Right now you are not yet able to auto-tag customers :( I’m hoping this will be a feature that is added soon! However, you can add or update other profile information automatically using the Squarespace Commerce API. More on that here!
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Users that create accounts and purchase a membership are automatically tagged by Squarespace as “accepts marketing.” Members of free member areas will be sent an automated opt-in confirmation after signing up that they will need to click on to confirm that they want to receive emails from you.
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People who are customers through Squarespace Scheduling are not pulled into the Profiles panel. However, you can manage customers, set up automated emails, and do similar CRM-like activities for scheduling customers from within the Scheduling area. For more info on this, check out this post: How to Use Squarespace Scheduling as an eCommerce Tool
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In addition to being able to view and manage customers from the Profiles panel you can also see some customer info in the Squarespace Commerce mobile app. Check out this post for 5 Squarespace Commerce App Tips & Tricks!
