Making it easier to build audiences in Twilio Segment

At Littledata we were inspired by the Twilio Signals presentation in August, about building end-to-end marketing and personalisation campaigns, to extend our already comprehensive Shopify source for Segment.

Littledata makes it ridiculously easy for Shopify brands to track customer events and customer state in Segment.

To give you a taste of Segment personalisation in action, we also wrote a recipe for building audiences from your Shopify customers in Twilio Engage to export to Klaviyo.

Support for Shopify’s new checkout

Shopify is removing the ability to add third-party scripts to its new checkout, which includes adding Segment’s AnalyticsJS library for pageviews and events.

But don’t worry. Littledata’s server-side checkout tracking allows you to get fully accurate checkout conversion steps without any tagging of the checkout pages.

Shopify marketing consent

On the data side, we’ve added four new marketing consent traits for customers, to ensure any campaigns triggered via Engage are legally compliant with email and SMS marketing laws:

• email_consent_state
• email_opt_in_level
• sms_consent_state
• sms_opt_in_level

Next up, we started passing in the Shopify Customer Privacy state, as chosen on the Shopify storefront (e.g. via a cookie banner), so campaigns and personalisations can be gated based on customer privacy preferences.

Customer privacy and cookie consent

All events sent via Littledata will have a user_consent property, which maps the Customer Privacy API getTrackingConsent method e.g. 

{

  marketing: 'yes',

  analytics: 'no',

  preferences: 'yes',

  sale_of_data: '',

  gpc: ''

}

At the heart of personalisation is strong identity resolution, and for brands wanting to link Shopify customer behaviour with a broader set of customer integrations (offline or online) we now support using a Shopify Customer Metafield option as the user identifier. This means you can pass your own customer ID to Shopify when you create or update a customer, and our Segment connection will pick up this metafield.

Lifetime value and user properties

To enable better segmentation of customer audiences we now have some further user properties added to Order Completed, Order Cancelled and Post Purchase Upsell events:

• lifetime_revenue_littledata
• shopify_customer_id_littledata
• purchase_count_littledata
• payment_gateway_littledata

For example, you could build an audience of high first-time buyers: where purchase_count_littledata = 1 and lifetime_revenue_littledata > 500.

Point of Sale location

We added location_id to the Point of Sale (POS) Order Placed event so that Shopify Point of Sale orders, linked to the customer, can also be split by order location.

These POS orders can be linked back to online behaviour, so you could build an audience of users that visited a particular location after an Instagram campaign.

Custom product properties

And finally, we are now tracking custom line item properties for the Order Completed event.

Some stores add custom properties to products (e.g. that they are part of a bundle, or a custom variant). These properties are set under a new array called product_properties and sent as a key-value pair.