Best Practices of App User Segmentation

Audience segmentation allows you to break down your large audience into unique niches to better understand how they're using your app. This can include how often they're purchasing, what they're purchasing, and potentially even what triggered them to download it.

All of this information is exceptionally valuable, allowing you to generate new ideas for how to improve the app experience, increase app downloads hack, increase app engagement and retention, and even discover new potential marketing opportunities based on your audience segments.

Actually gaining accurately segmented data can be tricky to do, however, unless you have audience segmentation tools. This is why in-app tracking analytics tools like MyTracker are so important for app developers and businesses.

What is app user segmentation?

App user segmentation involves arranging your users into smaller groups according to their similarities. Segmentation does not need to be complicated. 

For example, if you are a small one-man-band app you might want to start off with smaller groups that highlight two or three clear categories of user types, all with different needs.

The segments should show similarities in certain areas that have meaning to your app. They enable you to communicate to a large number of users at the same time but in a much more tailored and personal way. When the targeting and personalization of your mobile marketing channels campaign are on the point you could see an increase of conversion rates by up to 200%.



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Why segment users?

User segmentation helps teams discover what makes valuable power users tick so they can attract more of them. (organic user acquisition tips to view article here.)

Without segmentation, product development is a matter of intuition and guesswork and teams can't analyze whether their efforts paid off. Was a spike in feature usage due to power users or more widespread adoption by all users? The team may have a hunch, but without data broken down for each user segment, it's hard to know for certain.

Refined Mobile App User Segmentation

What does your mobile app user segmentation strategy look like? Are your segments based on deep insights and custom persona segments, or are you segmenting users based on just basic attributes like location and operating system?

For app publishers and developers today, getting customer segmentation right is crucial. The days of a universal app experience for everyone are over, as today's consumer expects personalized messaging, custom push notifications and other outreach efforts to all be based on their user behavior.

In order to meet these rising expectations, app publishers need a lot of high-quality data at their disposal. Thanks to the proliferation of high-quality app analytics tools along with the rise of platforms like Audience Bidding that uses carrier verified data to drive not just higher yield but also generate in-depth insights, app publishers and developers have the intelligence they need.

How to segment app users

How can you divide users to match your business goals? There are numerous attributes that you can use to this end. Here are some rules of thumb to remember when segmenting your users: 

Know your users: Who are your users? Where do they come from/which acquisition channels do they come from? Why do they use your app? 

How do they use your app? What are their pain points, and how does your app solve their problems? You should learn as much as you can about your current users and how they are using your app. 

In other words, you can utilize demographical, psychographic, or motivational segmentation models to get to know your audience in the best way possible.

Don't segment too much: Apply the three-adjective rule. Communication expert Frank Luby says, "If you need more than three adjectives, or three dimensions, to define your initial segments, you may be overthinking and over-engineering the effort." So, analyze thoroughly but in an organized manner so that you will be able to make use of this segmentation.

Set clear and prioritized goals: After identifying simple segments, define a goal for each group. These goals will guide your whole communication strategy. Thus, you need to ensure that they are actionable, measurable, and valuable.

Test and optimize: Segmentation is an ongoing process because there might be flaws in your initial segmentation and also because users are dynamic. While kicking off your strategic roadmap, you might ask yourself: Which group contains the fastest-growing segment of internet users? 

Planning ahead is always great, for sure. Nevertheless, this does not mean that you will use the same segmentation for years. Always test to see if your segmentation works. 

Make optimizations by revisiting your approach and keeping an eye on the changes in habits, demographics, motivations, trends. Testing is essential to refine your strategy to reach your business goals.

Different Types of Audience Segments to Track

If you're wondering "how to segment an audience" when it comes to apps, know that with the right tools, you can segment an audience by a large number of criteria.

With my Tracker, you can segment your audience by all of the following and more:

• Geography and demographics, including gender, age, country, region, or city
• Device information, including manufacturer, model, or OS version
• App information like the platform or app version downloaded
• Connection information (connection type, mobile telecom brand)
• An activity like new audience members, the number of session counts, and the average and overall session duration
• Finance data like products purchased, revenue earned, in-app purchases count, and the total sum of in-app purchases
• Ad monetization
• Subscription information, including new subscribers and paid subscribers
• Traffic source (campaign, partner)
• Custom events like product delivery or leveling up
• The period of time in which certain users took a certain action or engaged (fixed or moving)

Ways you can segment your audience

Geographic Segmentation

The geographical approach to segmentation requires dividing the users based on country, state, city, even specific towns or counties.

The first thing to consider in relation to geographic segmentation is the countries where your mobile app is available. This information will help you decide in which languages you will communicate with your users. On top of that, you will be able to customize your messages according to the characteristics of specific regions.

Demographic segmentation

Socio-demographic segmentation divides people based on indicators such as gender, age, marital status, education, income level, occupation, etc., which have a direct impact on the formation of consumer needs. This is the most commonly used method.

Customer actions

You can segment your customers by the actions they take. For instance, when customers download your app, put them into a new customer segment so you can tailor messages to that group. Send in-app notifications that show users how to navigate your app, or send a text message with a special welcome offer to encourage them to use your app.

The customer action can be anything you want. For instance, you can segment customers by the purchases they make, the level they clear on a game or the products they add to a cart.

Customer In-actions

When customers don't complete the desired action, put them into a segment of their own and create messages to get them to follow through. For instance, if a customer showed interest in an event but didn't sign up you, can segment these users and send them reminder messages via SMS or push notifications to RSVP for the event.

You can use this premise on any "inaction," like adding items to a cart but not buying them, starting a level on a game but not completing it, or starting a project but leaving it untouched for more than a week.

Buying behaviors

You can segment your users based on their buying behaviors too. Break customers down by how frequently they buy from you, by the products they purchase, or by the amount of money they spend on a monthly basis.

To segment app users based on their buying behaviors you'll have to collect data and maintain customer profiles so you can easily separate customers by their profile attributes.

You can even use special features to segment users into a specific group as soon as they meet your defined criteria. For instance, as soon as a user spends $100 on in-app purchases they'll be moved into a special loyal customer segment. You can also segment users in real-time and track their activity.

Behavioral segmentation requires going one step further of questioning who your users are and means asking what your users are doing. This is a deeper and more sophisticated approach to market segmentation strategy. 

Mainly, this type of segmentation is based on actions or inactions, spending or usage habits, feature use, session frequency, and search history. 

This might also be known as user status segmentation. User status segmentation is the process of identifying market segments based on their relation to a mobile app. It requires developing separate strategies for new arrivals, churned users, brand loyalists, etc. 

In other words, markets can be segmented into groups of non-users, prospective users, active and engaged users, ex-users, and so on.

Frequency of app use

Consider breaking your audience up by frequency of use. For instance, create three different segments each with varying levels of app activity. Customers that launch your app the most frequently are one segment; those that use your app on an occasional basis are another, and those that seldomly use your app are in the third segment.

Now you can create and send notifications and email messages that make sense for each group. You can reward your loyal app users with a coupon for an in-app purchase, or tell occasional app users about a great new feature to entice them to use your app more.


Based on a timeline
You can also create segments based on time. Create a segment for users who downloaded your app in the last month or users that made a purchase in the last two days. Every segment is created with a certain amount of time in mind. These segments will vary for each business, but by setting a timeframe on each segment you'll keep users engaged.