Learn how to create a solid concept to personalize your users' experience through segments in Userlane.
If you have different groups of users that have different levels of access within your platform or who use different functionalities, then you would want them to see only the content that is relevant to them.
Segmentation will allow you to divide your users into different groups, and show them only the content that is relevant to them, providing them with a more personalized experience.
This article will help you to create a logical and coherent concept on which to base your segmentation.
How it works
The segmentation depends mainly on the information you have about your users. The more data you have the more granular you can segment your users.
Follow these steps to create a good concept to segment your users:
1. Define groups and the characteristics that set them apart:
Think about your groups of users and the information that you normally gather about them in your application (e.g. trial/paying, roles & permissions; beginner versus advanced, etc.).
Think about the information you have about the user in the context of your company (e.g. department; job responsibilities; country-specific information.
Do you have enough? Do you need extra information?
If you think you need more information talk with your developers to see if this is possible to do and where the information is stored in your company.
2. Decide what content is relevant for everyone and what is specific to certain groups:
Do most of the users fulfill similar processes? Is there any data in forms that some users have to fill out differently than others? Or are there many parts that are only used by specific groups?
You can segment single content items or whole chapters in case of managing Guides within the Assistant. How do you know what would work best for you?
Here you have some ideas (based on segmentation):
User roles:
Relevant if: you have a rights management system with different user roles such as administrator, regular user, etc.
Recommended segmentation: often used for Guide content and allocated on a chapter level
Points to consider: if the permission model is granular and individual functionality can get assigned individually then the only way is to allocate segments to individual content such as Guides etc.
Departments:
Relevant if: users from different departments use your software differently or if they have to fill in different information in different processes
Recommended segmentation: It's likely that there is some overlap in content that is shared across departments and only some content requires specific input or is not relevant to all. Hence, it is often easier to apply the segmentation to a single content.
Purchased package / Feature sets:
Relevant if: you sell different versions of your product with different feature sets
Recommended segmentation: if you organize Guides in chapters based on the purchased package, then chapter level. If the overall chapter structure stays the same for every package but depending on the included features, a user might need more or fewer Guides, then segment single Guides. Other content items such as Announcements etc. needs to get segmented individually
Trial status:
Relevant if: your product has a trial period
Recommended segmentation: different chapters for your trial and converted users
New users:
Relevant if: your application frequently meets new users that need an extra onboarding flow
Recommended segmentation: extra chapter for new users and some extra content items targeted to users that are new to the application.
3. Decide what user groups you want to filter analytics by:
User segments used within analytics often differ from segments used for content targeting. Segments used as analytics filters usually are less specific and focus on broader user groups.
For example, you target some content to users that are in a trial and have a certain user role. For analytics purposes, you create a segment that only filters for trials and you create another segment that only filters for a certain user role. With this, you gain a bigger picture beyond content that helps you drive faster adoption and engagement of your application itself.
Considerations
You can connect different conditions for your user segment with AND or OR. This also allows you to create nested conditions. For example, you can create a user segment that contains all users that are admins OR paying users AND that are 'first time active' within the last 14 days.
When a specific segment is applied to a chapter, this segmentation will affect all Guides within this chapter. If you apply another segment to a single Guide in this chapter, those conditions will apply additionally.
