Custom audiences on Shopify: Create Tailored Segments
Create Ultra-Targeted Audiences in Just a Few Clicks with Kuma’s Audience Builder
Shopify merchants have tons of customer data, but using it effectively to boost sales isn’t always easy. That’s where predictive audiences and the audience builder come in.
This tool allows you to intelligently segment your customers into targeted groups, so you can send the right message to the right people and increase conversions. Discover how Kuma’s audience builder can transform your marketing strategy—accessible for both beginners and experts.
Why Is an Audience Builder Essential for Your Shopify Website?
- More precise, personalized targeting – Segmentation lets you deliver relevant messages to each customer group, boosting engagement and conversions.
- Optimized marketing budget – By focusing on high-potential customers (for example, using predictions), you avoid wasting spend on unresponsive audiences, improving your campaign ROI.
- Improved loyalty and retention – Identifying both your best customers and those at risk of churning enables you to personalize actions (VIP rewards, targeted re-engagement) to increase loyalty and long-term value.
- Time savings and simplicity – An audience builder automates Shopify data sorting, so even without technical expertise, you can create complex segments in just a few clicks—freeing up time to refine your campaign content.
How Does Kuma’s Audience Builder Work?
The heart of Kuma’s Shopify audience builder is a powerful yet intuitive filtering system. Kuma lets you easily navigate between two main data categories: historical data from past customer behavior on Shopify, and predictive data automatically generated by Kuma’s AI to forecast future behavior.
Under historical data, you can segment by:
- customers (language, location, tags, VIP status, etc.)
- orders (total spend, promo codes used, number of orders, refunds, etc.)
- purchased products (type, brand, category, etc.)
Under predictive data, you access advanced AI-calculated criteria, such as:
- likelihood of interest in specific brands, products, or product types
- purchase potential in the coming days (who’s likely to buy in the next 30 days)
- projected customer value over the next 12 months (Customer Lifetime Value)
Each filter can be combined to create highly specific audiences. For example, you can target customers with multiple past orders, who’ve purchased in a specific product category, and who have a high repurchase probability—while excluding users in a certain language. Kuma instantly calculates the segment size and shows related RFM stats.
Once your audience is built, you can save it and automatically sync it with your advertising platforms (Meta Ads, Google Ads, etc.) or email tools (Klaviyo, etc.) to activate highly targeted, high-performing campaigns.
Expected Results with Kuma’s Audience Builder
In practice, using predictive marketing audiences delivers tangible improvements:
- Better conversions – Offering the right offer to each segment significantly improves conversion rates compared to unsegmented campaigns.
- Higher advertising ROI – By focusing budget on high-potential customers, ad ROAS increases: every dollar spent drives more sales.
- Stronger customer loyalty – Customers receiving relevant offers feel valued, come back to purchase more often, and increase their long-term spend.
- Lower acquisition costs – By better leveraging your existing customer base instead of constantly acquiring new customers, you generate additional revenue at a lower cost.
How to Build Relevant Audiences Effectively
With its smart audience builder, Kuma lets you create ultra-targeted segments from your Shopify data. Here’s a step-by-step example:
1. Define Inclusion Criteria
In the first section, specify who should be included in your audience. Here, we filter RFM “Champions” customers, meaning your top buyers, then narrow it further with a product filter—only those who’ve purchased in the “Facial Care” category. Finally, we apply a predictive criterion: repurchase probability between 65% and 100%. This ensures only the most likely repeat buyers are included.
Kuma instantly shows the number of customers matching the criteria. Here, 1,491 customers out of 12,202 are included, or 12% of the total base. This immediate feedback makes it easy to adjust filters for an optimal audience size.
2. Add Exclusions
To refine targeting further, you can exclude certain profiles. In this example, we remove customers who purchased in the last 30 days. This focuses the campaign only on those who haven’t recently interacted with your brand.
3. Audience Summary
The visual summary shows the exact proportion of included (1,491) and excluded (201) customers, as well as the resulting audience size (1,290). This diagram helps you understand and validate your targeting before launching a campaign.
Kuma displays the RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) indicators of the audience compared to your overall base. In this example, targeted customers have:
- Average recency of 161 days, 115 days less than other customers
- Purchase frequency of 2.28 orders, +0.77 orders compared to the average customer
- Average revenue of $178, or +$60 compared to your overall customer base
These stats help validate the segment’s quality and potential before syncing it with your marketing tools (Meta Ads, Klaviyo, etc.). All that’s left is to save the audience with a name and description for easy identification when launching ultra-targeted campaigns.
Explore More with Kuma
Once your segments are defined, it’s easy to automate the export of your Shopify audiences to your ad tools.
You can also use your audiences in a Shopify-connected chatbot to personalize the customer experience in real time.
FAQ – Shopify Audience Builder with Kuma
The audience builder is a tool that lets you create customer segments based on behavioral, transactional, or predictive criteria. The goal is to precisely target specific profiles to optimize your marketing campaigns and increase conversions.
Kuma allows you to use two types of filters: historical data from your Shopify store (purchases, frequency, amounts, categories, discount codes…) and predictive data generated by AI (future purchase probability, churn risk, projected customer value, etc.).
Kuma displays the segment size in real time as you apply filters. You can also see how many customers are included or excluded, along with the percentage relative to your total customer base. This data is accompanied by RFM statistics for the audience you’re building. Thanks to this, Kuma helps you quickly understand the potential of your audience.
Predictive data helps you anticipate future customer behavior. For example, you can target only those with a high likelihood of repurchasing or those with predicted interest in specific products, product types, or brands. This significantly enhances the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Using Kuma’s audience builder improves ROAS by focusing your budget on segments with known characteristics and customer profiles. At the same time, more personalized campaigns strengthen retention and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
Yes, once your audience is created in Kuma, you can automatically sync it with your advertising and email tools, such as Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram), Google Ads, or Klaviyo. This allows you to quickly launch targeted campaigns on the right segments.