Guide
How to prepare a customer file
What a customer export needs to contain for cohort twins, what to leave out, and how to send campaign results afterwards.
In build
Format
What format should the file be in?
- CSV or Excel (XLSX), one row per customer, with a header row.
- UTF-8 encoding for CSV, so names of products and places survive.
- Up to 500,000 rows. For cohorts to be reliable, at least 5,000.
- At least six usable features from the groups below.
Columns
Which columns should it include?
| Feature group | Example columns |
|---|---|
| Customer key | Your internal customer ID, so later campaign results can be joined. It is hashed on upload and the original is not stored. |
| Demographics | Age or age band, gender, household size |
| Geography | Country and region or state. Not street addresses. |
| Tenure | Customer since (date) or months as a customer |
| Product holdings | Which products or plans each customer holds, one column each or a list |
| Transactions | Days since last purchase, purchases in the last 12 months, spend in the last 12 months, spend by category |
| Engagement | Last channel used, email or app activity in the last 90 days |
| Service | Support tickets in the last 12 months, NPS or satisfaction score if you collect it |
| Campaign history | Past exposures and responses, if you have them |
Leave out
What should be left out?
Names, email addresses, phone numbers, national ID numbers and full addresses are not needed and are dropped if they arrive. Free-text fields are dropped too, unless they are survey verbatims you choose to include, in which case they are summarised per cohort and the originals discarded.
After a campaign
How do I send campaign results?
One row per customer per offer, or one row per cohort per offer, with: the campaign name, the customer key (or cohort), the offer, whether the customer was exposed, whether they responded, whether they converted, and revenue if you track it. Row-level results are aggregated to cohorts on upload and the rows discarded.
Checklist
Before you send it
- One row per customer, with a header row
- At least six usable features
- Customer key included; names, emails, phones and addresses removed
- Dates in one format throughout
- A note of what each column means if the names are internal codes
Ready to talk?
Tell us what you want to test and we will tell you whether your data is enough.