Customer Groups (also referred to as price codes) are a way to tag individual subscribers so you can target them with specific incentives, discounts, or perks. They're one of the conditions you can use when building a conditional incentive through Flex Incentives.
This article explains what Customer Groups are, how they work, and common ways merchants use them.
What is a Customer Group?
A Customer Group is a metadata tag assigned to a subscriber. Under the hood, it's an arbitrary text string. Examples might include vip, employee, veteran, or free-shipping-2024.
By itself, the tag doesn't do anything. It only becomes meaningful when you build a Conditional Incentive in Flex Incentives that targets a specific Customer Group. At that point, every subscriber tagged with that price code will qualify for the incentive.
Common use cases
Customer Groups are flexible by design, so merchants use them in a variety of ways. Some of the most common patterns:
- VIPs and influencers: Tag high-value customers or brand ambassadors to give them a deeper discount than your standard subscriber rate.
- Employee discounts: Set up an employee group so staff get a special rate on subscriptions.
- Professional discounts: Pet food brands sometimes offer veterinarians a deeper discount; healthcare brands do the same for nurses, doctors, etc.
- Grandfathered perks: If you ran a "free shipping forever" promotion, you can tag those subscribers and apply a free shipping incentive that only fires for that group.
- DIY membership tiers: Some merchants build bronze/silver/gold style tiers using Customer Groups, based on tenure, spend, or another business rule they manage themselves.
How Customer Groups are assigned
Customer Groups are currently set via API only — there is no UI in the Ordergroove Dashboard for managing them. This means assigning and updating Customer Groups requires a technical resource on your team.
You can set a Customer Group:
- When creating a subscriber via the API
- By updating an existing subscriber through the update endpoint
- During a customer migration, by including the price code in your migration data
Good to know
A few important constraints and considerations:
- One group per subscriber. Each subscriber can be assigned to only one Customer Group at a time. If you want to move a subscriber between groups (e.g., promoting them from silver to gold), you'll need to update their price code via API.
- No automatic management. Ordergroove doesn't automatically assign, update, or remove Customer Groups based on subscriber behavior. If you want tier-based logic (e.g., "subscribers with 12+ orders become gold tier"), you'll need to build and maintain that logic yourself.
- Capitilization Matters. Because Customer Groups are essentially a free-text field, it's worth establishing a naming convention up front and documenting it internally. vip, VIP, and Vip are three different groups as far as Ordergroove is concerned.