How we segment an audience:
Lifecycle · Tiers · Badges
A single engine under three fields the producer already understands – plus five candidate naming systems for the tier ladder. Built on a 9-track research sweep of HubSpot, Salesforce, Klaviyo, CleverTap, Braze, Zoho, ActiveCampaign, ticketing platforms, RFM practice and loyalty-program psychology.
Three dimensions, no rules of engagement
Today lifecycle, tiers and tags live side by side with no defined relationship. Each one is fine alone – together they collide.
Lifecycle
New · Rising · Core · At-risk · Lapsed. A temporal state – but "VIP" used to sit inside it, mixing status into a time axis. Recency runs on calendar days, which breaks for annual events.
Tiers
Bronze · Silver · Gold · Platinum. Understandable but generic – and nothing defines what earns a tier: events? money? both? "Veteran" wants in but measures a different thing (tenure).
Tags
EarlyBuyer, GroupBuyer, Spender, Responsive... applied ad-hoc, no thresholds, no manager view, and no line between what a tag is versus what a tier is.
Three fields, one engine
Every attendee action lands in an append-only ledger. Three engines read it, three fields surface it. Nothing can contradict, and every threshold recomputes cleanly from history when a client edits it later.
The Ledger
Append-only record of value events per attendee:
Where each signal lives – the five questions
| Signal | Lives in | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Events attended | Tier input | Rankable. Counted over a rolling 24 months in 3–4 bins – quintiles over "attended 1, 2 or 3 events" is fake precision. |
| 2 · Rooms / F&B revenue | Tier input | Monetary sub-score. Tier needs events AND LTV, so the rooms-always buyer with 2 events can outrank a GA-only buyer with 4. |
| 3 · Group buyers | Badge | Not rankable. Their money already counts in Monetary; the badge captures the pattern for group offers and referral flows. |
| 4 · Early / late buyers | Badge | Gold for pricing flows, meaningless as rank. Early Bird = first-window buyer 2+ times; Last-Minute = final-week buyer. |
| 5 · Engagement score | Lifecycle modifier | Ratio with decay (share of messages engaged, events attended vs opportunity). Splits identical recency states: "Cooling · reachable" vs "Cooling · silent" – different flow each. Never feeds the tier: blended scores hide the driver. |
Status you earn, not a label that flickers
↑ Upgrade instantly
The moment the threshold is crossed, the attendee levels up. Goal-gradient works for us: always show progress-to-next-tier on the profile.
↓ Downgrade gently
Only at season end, with notice and a grace window – "attend 1 event to keep Backstage". Demoted customers measurably end up less loyal than never-promoted ones, so demotion is engineered, not automatic. Tier freezes during the producer's off-season.
📅 Event-relative recency
"Lapsed" means missed 2 consecutive editions they used to attend – never "no purchase in 365 days", which marks every annual-festival fan dead in month 11. Cadence detected per producer from their event calendar.
🔒 Sustained qualification
Tier = events AND LTV over the trailing window. Qualifying metric stays isolated from anything spendable (future points program), so a redemption can never demote anyone – the Salesforce currency split, adopted early.
Two ladders in the brand's own language
Flowz is flow – water gives us ladders that are on-brand, calm enough for a retreat, big enough for a festival. A stranger ranks both in under 2 seconds.
WAVES
Energy magnitude. The crowd version – reads perfectly for bass, parties, festivals.
Flowz brandWATERS
Scale of water. The universal version – drop < stream < river < ocean needs zero explanation in any vertical.
Flowz brandELAD'S CURRENT CHOICE
The working pick – water scale with the Wave step and the Tsunami apex. Persona-name variant below each rung as an option.
Working pickThree more, sliding up the cool scale
BACKSTAGE
Venue proximity physically encodes rank – every promoter and attendee decodes it instantly. Industry vernacular, not decoration.
Cool · safestFIRE
Heat is monotonic – spark to inferno self-ranks. Born for EDM and bass brands; deliberately wrong for yoga. That's what skins are for.
Cooler · genre skinAPEX
The unique one: the top tier is not a threshold – it's the top 5% of this producer's audience, live. A 300-person retreat and a 50k festival get equally exclusive apexes with zero tuning. No CRM ships this.
Coolest · dynamic apexFive architectures considered
| Approach | What it is | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| A · 3 fields + 1 engine | Lifecycle, Tier, Badges as visible fields; recency/frequency/monetary/engagement engines underneath, all reading one ledger. | RECOMMENDED |
| B · Fused RFM grid | One set of named cells (Champions, At Risk, Can't Lose Them...) like Klaviyo/CleverTap. Loses "Gold member going cold" – our highest-value insight. | KEEP AS VIEW |
| C · Fan Score 0–100 | One blended number per attendee. Composites hide drivers; no event platform exposes one; only ~40% of sales teams trust opaque scores. | REJECTED |
| D · Points program | Fan-facing points, redemptions, leaderboards (Tixr Rewards style). A different product – but its ledger + currency-split lessons apply now. | LATER PHASE |
| E · Two-axis grade | HubSpot-style A1–C3: value letter × recency number. Nice power-user shorthand for grid cells, not a primary construct. | CELL LABELS |
What the big platforms actually ship
Click any screenshot to open it full size – some have extra screens to page through.
Clients edit definitions, never the math
Threshold editing and custom tags are a Pro-plan upgrade – the base plan runs on our opinionated defaults. On Pro, every threshold is a sentence, every edit previews its impact, and a Flowz rep tunes it with the client.
Histogram + drag handles (Braze)
The producer drags the boundary over their real attendee distribution – counts update live.
Impact preview (Klaviyo)
Nothing saves blind. Plus a validation nudge: "62% of Cooling actually lapsed – thresholds look healthy."
Custom Tags Pro
Producers define their own auto-badges with the same sentence rules:
Opinionated defaults, hard guardrails
📦 The defaults we ship
= frequent / core
the top tier
= lapsed
= new
season-end downgrade
client's own history
🛡️ Guardrails from the failure research
Two open calls, then we spec it
1 · Lifecycle names
Self-describing – a producer parses it in one read. Engagement splits Cooling.
Brand personality, but needs a legend. Either way: no word repeats on the tier axis.
2 · The default tier ladder
Brand-language water ladder, persona-name variant optional.
Full candidates on slides 6–7. Dynamic top-% apex worth shipping regardless.