Create user segments for better targeting

About User Segments

A user segment is a set of filter conditions to target a specific user group. There is a standard set of attributes that you can use as default. Additionally, you can enrich user profiles using custom attributes and use these within user segments.

This article highlights 

• the benefits
• requirements
• steps to set up a User Segmentation
• further considerations

Why use it

User segmentation offers several benefits for businesses. Here are some key advantages:

1. Targeted Marketing: User segmentation allows to tailor your marketing efforts to specific groups of users based on their characteristics, preferences, or behaviors. This results in more relevant and personalized marketing campaigns, leading to higher conversion rates and customer engagement.

2. Improved Customer Experience: By understanding different user segments, you can create customized experiences that cater to the unique needs and preferences of each group. This enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty, as users receive content, products, and services that align with their specific interests and requirements.

3. Increased Conversion Rates: When marketing messages and offers are highly relevant to a particular user segment, it increases the likelihood of conversion. By focusing on the specific pain points, desires, or interests of a segmented group, businesses can optimize their marketing strategies and drive higher conversion rates.

4. Efficient Resource Allocation: User segmentation enables you to allocate resources more efficiently. By identifying high-value user segments, you can prioritize their marketing efforts, product development, and customer support to maximize returns on investment. This approach helps avoid wasting resources on segments with lower potential.

5. Data-Driven Decision Making: User segmentation relies on data analysis and insights. By analyzing user behavior, preferences, and demographics, businesses gain a deeper understanding of their customer base. This data-driven approach helps in making informed decisions, identifying market trends, and adapting strategies to meet evolving customer needs.

6. Personalization at Scale: User segmentation allows you to achieve personalization at scale. Instead of manually customizing interactions with individual users, you can create tailored experiences for each segment. Automation and targeted messaging make it possible to deliver personalized content, recommendations, and offers to a large user base simultaneously.

Requirements

You must have an Administrator or Moderator role to create user segments.

Steps

1. Create a segmentation concept

Before creating any segments, we encourage you to develop a coherent logical segmentation concept. You can read our best practices article on segments here. 

2. Set up the user profile enrichment - inform your developers

To have segments working with custom attributes, the process flow to enrich the custom attribute with additional information must be set in place.

Userlane Snippet

Your developers need to adapt the snippet to share the relevant information with Userlane.

Browser Extension

• You import additional attribute values manually as described in this article
• Your developers need to adapt the SSO (Single Sign-On) integration to share the relevant information with Userlane as described here.

3. Create the attributes

When you have Userlane integrated with the snippet and you got feedback from the developers you can start to create the required attributes now.
When you have Userlane integrated with the browser extension, skip this step since you either have the attributes created automatically or you created them already during the manual user import process.

4. Create the user segments

After you have created the required attributes you can create user segments. Besides the custom attributes, you can also use behavior based criteria to build your segment. This article explains how to include such criteria, that are available by default in the segmentation builder.

5. Apply the segments to your content or use them as an analytics filter

Content such as Guides, Tooltips and Announcements become more relevant when you target them for specific user groups only.
Allocate user segments to Guides within the MANAGE section and to Announcements or NPS within ANNOUNCE section in our Portal. Allocate user segments to Tooltips within the Editor.

You can also allocate user segments to chapters to bundle targeting for a group of Guides within the Assistant.

All analytics pages can be filtered with user segments. Use user segments to better understand the results and to compare different user groups with each other. It will support you in interpreting the data even more.

Considerations

• You can't delete or change the type of an attribute, but you can edit its name and key later.
• Allocating user segments at the chapter level instead of each individual guide can save time. However, if you offer guides through other channels like announcements, you need to allocate the user segment directly to the guide for it to apply.
• If you use direct links or integrate guides with JS commands in your application, any allocated segments are ignored.
• To see a specific user's profile, create a segment with their customer user ID and open their profile from the segmentation builder.
• Creating segments to test content before going live is common, especially for announcements, NPS, and tooltips.
• For targeting specific pages, consider using context-based segmentation with page segments.
• Use user segments to show tooltips only to the relevant group of users.