What do 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.
Here are four ways to use deep audience insights to your benefit:
Not all of your users are the same. This is an obvious statement, of course, but are you taking this to heart in your monetization strategy? Advertisers are willing to spend more money to reach certain people. Through more accurate mobile intelligence, you can determine precisely who those individuals are. This knowledge can then inform everything from ad pricing to user acquisition and everything in between.
Publishers today have complete visibility into the user journey within their app ecosystem. However, the true identity of any users is an amalgamation of various interests that can only be completely inferred by knowing their journey across the various apps that they use. Unfortunately, publishers often do not have access to the required data that can help build this persona graph - that advertisers heavily rely on for targeting.
Once you know who advertisers value most among your user base, you can then tailor your marketing and user acquisition strategies to acquire more app users who have the same attributes.
What social media channels do they use? Are they more likely to use the Android or iOS app store? Do they respond well to targeted messages over email? What networks/channels bring you maximum revenue? What user segments are the buyers relying on those networks, interested in? All of this can be invaluable for mobile marketing efforts.
The inverse works here as well. If there are certain segments of users that are decidedly less valuable, it’s helpful to know that and to avoid acquiring them via marketing efforts. Some users may be more likely to quickly churn or are less valuable to advertisers and thus don’t have a big impact on the monetization front. If these types of app users are more likely to find your app through certain channels, then you can be sure to deprioritize those.
But, no matter which path you choose, knowledge is power. You won’t know how to prioritize mobile marketing initiatives without the deep audience insights first.
Once you know who your high value users are, it makes sense to pull out all of the stops to keep them around. Do your app’s most valuable users prefer targeted messages, or are they generally not a fan of app messages? Do they like being able to try out new features, or do they prefer freebies? Whatever the answers may be for your top app users, make sure you are personalizing offerings and services to keep them happy and engaged.
App churn is an ever-present concern for app publishers and developers. Within the first 90 days after downloading an app, over seven in 10 will have already deleted it off their phones.
Categorizing your users into different behavioral personas (by overlapping first-party publisher data with telco-verified signals, as explained earlier) also helps you understand and estimate the churn at a segment level. But, odds are good that some of these churned or dormant users can be brought back into the fold. Especially if these individuals share characteristics with your top audience segments, then it may be worthwhile trying to get them to become active app users again through rewards, retargeting and other marketing efforts.
Getting mobile app user segmentation can open a lot of doors, but it requires good, actionable data. Make sure you work with a partner that can supply you with this intelligence if you don’t have it on hand already.
Register to our blog updates newsletter to receive the latest content in your inbox.
