With the mobile app industry getting overcrowded, it is becoming far imperative to look into different ways to get the attention of users with the right message at the right time.
Updated December 13, 2022
Ever wondered why Amazon, Starbucks, and other such applications announce sales or discounts during festivals or why users feel inclined to buy more products from a brand that donates a share for child welfare?
It is becoming the core of multiple business strategies to rule on the minds and hearts of the target audience. This is possible through behavioral segmentation.
Behavioral segmentation, as depicted from its name, is a process in which you divide your target user base into smaller groups based on their behavior.
Behavior in this context means their knowledge, choices, habits, and attitude towards your product or services.
App developers can use this process to segment user statuses into categories such as frequent users, mid-frequent users, seasonal users, and unengaged users.
The process is considered by mobile app developers and marketers for better understanding the needs and desires of the customers and exploring the opportunities to optimize their experience, and ultimately, gaining better revenue.
The process of behavioral segmentation offers four main benefits:
Hire a mobile app marketing agency to ensure your app is hitting the right demographics
1. Deliver Personalized Experience
Knowing the fact that not every customer has the same expectations from a mobile app, dividing and sorting them into different groups helps in getting a better clarity of their needs and wants, and thus, target them with different offers and personalization content.
A personalized experience leverages the chance for customer loyalty as well.
2. Predict the Future
Behavioral segmentation helps to collect a heap of historical data which eases the process of predicting their next move. This helps in making an app marketing strategy with the futuristic approach - something for which you consider a guide on using predictive analytics for the app.
Customer behavior can help with shifting through the behavioral data and crafting a longer-term plan.
3. Decide the Priorities
Since not all the users can bring the same set of benefits to your app business, it is necessary to distinguish them from each other and target those with higher value to your brand. This is another reason why you should look into behavioral segmentation process.
Your customer base is full of light users and heavy users - it is up to your business to cater to the most loyal customers when crafting priorities.
4. Upgrade Performance
Lastly, focusing on behavioral segmentation enables app developers and marketers to easily gauge their app performance and other key metrics, apart from downloads like customer engagement and retention. This eventually helps to build a long-term strategy for their application.
Behavioral segmentation is important in app marketing and includes other components that allow marketers to get better insights of planning, decision, and buying journey of your target audience.
What Are the 4 Types of Behavioral Segmentation?
There are fives types of behavioral market segmentation that your team can factor into your marketing efforts:
- Purchasing behavior
- Occasion purchasing
- Customer usage behavior
- Customer loyalty
- Benefits and loyalty programs
1. Purchasing Behavior
This section relates to how a customer behaves while making a decision of purchase - Do they read every single detail added with the product/service? Or they go with the one recommended by their family and friends? Or they buy something out of their habit?
In other words, looking into the factors that influence their buying experience and thus, putting those elements more often in your app marketing strategy. And eventually, gaining more profits.
Figuring out behavior patterns of certain customers can help improve customer experience and customer satisfaction.
2. Occasion Purchasing
Many customers buy an app product/services during a particular occasion only. So, considering the occasion purchasing subcategory of behavioral segmentation is also important.
Or better say, looking into what occasions drive better sales and revenue, and thus focuses on a better marketing campaign in those days can add more value to your business.
Additional Reading: ‘How to Improve Your E-Commerce Customer Experience’
3. Customer Usage
In this section, we consider the time of day, month, and year they interact with a mobile app more frequently. For example, an office guy spends more time on food-ordering apps like Zomato during lunch hours than other time periods.
This information helps to target the users with specific marketing messages via push notifications, in-app messages, and other strategies more effectively.
4. Loyalty
Considering not all the users who spend time on your mobile app are your loyal customers, identifying the loyal ones is also important. This is what covers under this component of behavioral segmentation, and further, used for delivering lucrative benefits to them and preventing them getting magnetized to your competitors.
In every customer journey stage, there should be specific touchpoints that can increase the opportunity for brand loyalty and look to the bigger picture of customer lifetime value.
5. Benefits
This behavioral segmentation component helps you to uncover what makes customers choose your brand over others - Do they like the quality of the solutions you offer? Or your email marketing tactics? Or rely on your brand because of convenience?
Getting an idea of this helps you with uncovering the real motivators for your customers and thus, working heavily on those aspects.
To improve customer loyalty with regular users, provide options for rewards programs or loyalty programs, campaigns on social media, or even something as simple as an email on a birthday. These all can go a long way to improve engagement level.
These five subcategories of behavioral segmentation help businesses, mobile app experts, and digital marketing agencies build better marketing strategies and thus, gaining more ROI.
With this attended to, let’s turn directly towards different ways to introduce the concept of behavioral segmentation in mobile app marketing.
5 Behavioral Segmentation Examples to Consider for App Marketing
Read through examples of behavioral segmentation that can inspire your marketing team:
- Remarket your products
- Search for new customers
- Make better user personas
- Customize messages by device
- Attend to conversion-ready audiences
1. Remarket Your Products
Under this technique, mobile app development companies and marketers look into the search and purchase history of the users. Based on the insights gained, they explore different ways to bring them back on their platform and get sales.
The finest example to understand this concept based upon behavioral segmentation is Dell.
The computer technology company keeps a real-time record of how many people visited their site, which product they searched the most, and how much time they spent. Based on the insights gained, they create ads featuring those products and thus, encourage a group of customers to take the next step.
2. Find New Customers
Unlike other marketing strategies that focuses on targeting your niche industry, behavioral segmentation helps with finding alternate ways to acquire more high-value customers.
For example, an on-demand delivery grocery app can target the audience of fitness world. They can spread the word that their healthy food can bring faster and effective results of their workout. And in this way, prompt the users to put more food items into their cart.
Customer segmentation strategies like this one can turn non-users into new believers of your product.
3. Make Better User Persona
Similar to location-based segmentation, behavioral segmentation helps businesses with gaining higher benefits on creating user personas for developing an app. The technique helps the businesses and app marketers with dividing their audience in a more specific way and investing their energy in the right place.
For example, users who have recently purchased or constructed a house are less likely to sell their home.
Knowing this, a real-estate company can exclude these homeowners from their campaign and send promotional notifications to only those who wishes to sell their house. This can bring more engagement and conversions, while saving efforts on targeting new homeowners.
Prioritize marketing efforts and strategies that will craft the perfect user persona for your business or service.
4. Customize Messages Based on Devices
Behavioral segmentation also provides app marketers with ways to amp up your push notification game and deliver revenue-generating messages.
The concept empowers businesses and marketers to understand that their iOS users can spend more than those using Android devices, and thus, target iOS users first.
5. Pay More Attention to Conversion-Ready Audience
While there might have been various users who search for a particular item or visit your sites for endless times, not all of them will be planning to buy products or services at once.
In such a scenario, the concept of behavioral segmentation can help you with determining who can be easily converted and thus, send more promotional content to those visitors - rather than targeting all at the same time.
A group of customers is waiting for you – just need to find the right message to speed up with purchasing process.
Behavioral Segmentation Can Help You Gain Valuable Insights Into Your Target Audience
The competition in the mobile app market is rising day and night. In such a scenario, investing all of your time and effort into any activity will be a complete waste, if you are unfamiliar with how your target user base behaves and what they actually want.
Explore customer data to see how your target group of customers deals with any decision-making process or purchase decision.
So, look ahead to understand the mechanism of behavioral segmentation and supercharge your app marketing strategies by introducing the concept in your plans. And ultimately, bring better ROI.