7 user segmentation types to connect with your customers and drive better customer experiences

It may be impossible to tailor your product, website, or customer experience to every single individual—but luckily, there’s another way to make each user feel like one in a million. 

Segmenting your customer base reveals user-centric insights that help your product team and stakeholders prioritize improvements, create laser-focused messaging, and improve the customer experience—all based on your target audiences’ specific needs. 

This guide looks at the different types of user segmentation and how to use them to get closer to your ideal customers.

A field spotter's guide to user segmentation types

Different user segmentation types enable you to understand, empathize with, and cater to various cohorts of users who all share common traits. Here are seven ways to segment your customer base and uncover new opportunities—plus tips on using qualitative and quantitative behavior analytics tools to improve user segmentation every step of the way.

1. Behavioral segmentation

Behavioral segmentation groups users together based on actions they take (or don’t take) on your site or in your product. Examples include:

• Logging in

• Feature usage

• Clicking a particular button

• Viewing a product

• Saving an item to wishlist

• Starting the checkout process

• Clicking unsubscribe

• Scrolling to the end of a page

• Starting a chat

• Converting into a paid customer

Most analytics tools—like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Contentsquare (that’s us! 👋)—use functionalities like events, properties, and user attributes to capture these behaviors. 

Use behavioral segmentation to understand your customers—learn how to replicate what works and reduce what doesn’t. For example:

• Spot the actions that lead to conversion so you can encourage prospective and new customers to take them, too. Does your segmentation analysis reveal that repeat customers save items to their wishlist before making a purchase? Prompt users to set up a wishlist as part of their onboarding.

• Identify behaviors linked with churn and put flows in place to avoid them. If you notice that dips in product metrics like login frequency commonly precede canceled accounts, proactively target these users with re-engagement campaigns to bring them back to your product.

🚀 If you’re using Contentsquare: filter data from Heatmaps (color-coded visualizations of user behavior at scale) and Session Replays (recordings of individual users’ behaviors on screen) by specific events or behaviors to uncover even more context.

Filter your heatmaps by ‘returning users’, for example, and you’ll be able to tell if users engage differently with your page the second time they see it.

2. Demographic segmentation

Demographic segmentation groups users together based on characteristic traits about who they are. Examples of these traits include:

• Age

• Gender

• Education level

• Marital status

• Income

Tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Pendo provide this customer data, and can be integrated with other platforms—like your user behavior insights suite and your customer relationship management (CRM) tool—to offer more granular analysis and targeting options.

Use demographic segmentation to understand exactly what your target audience is looking for and provide customized, personalized experiences for them. For example, launch an email marketing campaign aimed at women aged 25–34 featuring a roundup of the most popular products bought by people in this bracket.

🚀 If you’re using Contentsquare: supplement your demographic data with first-hand responses straight from your users with Surveys. Trigger targeted surveys aimed at specific demographics to build out your customer profile for these groups. 

You can get started fast, since there’s no need to build a survey from scratch. Choose from a library of 40+ templates, (including a user persona survey one) or use Contentsquare’s AI to generate a custom survey based on your goals. 

Browse the template library to find a survey to get you started, and then customize it to meet your needs.

3. Psychographic segmentation

Psychographics is the study of consumers based on psychological traits such as lifestyle and values. Whereas demographic segmentation is based on objective factors like age, psychographic segmentation focuses on more subjective factors like:

• Personality traits

• Lifestyle

• Attitude

• Values

• Interests

• Opinions

Values-based segmentation is another user segmentation type that falls under this category. For example, using values-based segmentation, an ecommerce business might target eco-conscious shoppers and let them know that its packaging is now fully biodegradable, or a B2B SaaS company might share their latest net zero initiative.

To develop a psychographic understanding of your customers and learn more about what’s important to them, conduct user interviews. A virtual user interview tool like Contentsquare’s Interviews enables you to source interviewees who match your criteria, fast.

When building your profiles, Adele Revella, CEO of the Buyer Persona Institute and author of Buyer Personas, recommends starting with the question:

“What happened on the day you first decided you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this goal?”

Then, whatever their response is, dig deeper. Asking probing, open-ended questions unlocks psychographic insights that help you connect deeply with your customers and boost brand loyalty.

4. Geographic segmentation

Geographic segmentation groups users together based on their physical location in the world.

You can zoom out for market-wide research (like EMEA or NAMER) or zoom in to get local insights, using categories like:

• Region

• Continent

• Country

• City

To understand how location affects behavior, filter data by country in a session replay tool like Contentsquare’s Session Replays. This lets you watch how users from specific places engage with your site, so you can see exactly what they do and why. If you have localized pages, be sure to review your data for any bugs or usability issues that may have slipped in during the translation process.

Use geographic segmentation to ensure you’re compliant with local laws and regulations, and localize your site and content to provide more relevant, tailored experiences.

💡 Pro tip: With Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis, you can test the speed of your website in different locations. This is one instance where geographic segmentation is extremely helpful, since your load speed is likely to vary depending on where your users access your site from. 

Page speed is a metric you should keep an eye on, since it’s crucial to the customer experience. By some measures, a load time delay of just 2 seconds can cause up to 87% of users to exit. 

With this tool, you’ll be able to check speed if you notice that conversions are down from visitors in a specific location—and make any fixes you need to.

5. Firmographic segmentation

Instead of focusing on individuals like the other customer segmentation models we’ve seen so far, firmographics is used to segment organizations based on their attributes. These include:

• Industry

• Company size

• Number of offices

• Growth stage

Use firmographic segmentation as part of your B2B marketing efforts to create marketing campaigns, messaging, and sales outreach that speak to your target market’s business needs and pain points.

For example, this segmentation type could help you foreground the most suitable pricing plans based on company size, share content related to trends and challenges in their industry, or create onboarding flows related to their role’s most common jobs-to-be-done.

But remember: even when you’re segmenting based on organization, you still need to connect with the humans making the buying decisions—so keep empathy at the center of everything you do.

🤝 Enrich your CRM with behavior insights to deliver a more personal experience: use the Contentsquare + HubSpot integration to bring behavior insights from Contentsquare right into your contact timeline in HubSpot. Leverage this data to prepare for sales calls and trigger marketing flows based on firmographic data and user behavior, for more effective B2B marketing and sales outreach.

6. Technographic segmentation

Technographic segmentation groups users based on the technology they’re using to access your site or product. This includes:

• Device

• Browser 

• Operating system

This type of segmentation gives you a closer look at how your audience accesses and engages with your site and helps ensure you’re providing high-quality and consistent user experiences regardless of platform or device.

Technographic segmentation allows you to tailor your UX and outreach to each user’s preferred medium and helps you spot pesky device- or platform-specific errors and usability issues that negatively impact specific groups of users.

If you’re using Contentsquare, for example, you might filter user behavior data from Heatmaps and Session Replays by device to discover issues affecting users on a specific piece of hardware. You can then share your findings with developers or stakeholders to give them all the context they need to make the fix or take action. 

If the issue you’re facing is a Javascript or API error rather than a UX problem, Contentsquare’s segmentation tools simplify this task even further. Just head over to Error Analysis in your Contentsquare account and segment your error data by device, and you’ll learn which types of hardware the bug appears on. 

🏆 Etam used technographic insights to boost campaign conversions by 16%

Etam, one of the world’s largest popular lingerie groups, decided to start using Contentsquare to analyze the performance of their flagship sale: the Love Price campaign.

The team used Heatmaps to uncover which page elements users see, and which they don’t. When they filtered the data by mobile devices, they learned that only 40% of users scrolled far enough down their landing page to see the sale banner.

Clearly, the pages’ information hierarchy needed a refresh—a large number of mobile visitors didn’t even know about Etam’s sale!  

The company redesigned their landing page, to great success. The sale banner’s exposure rate increased to 99%, and the page’s conversion rate per click increased by 16%. 

📖 Read the full case study here.

7. Value-based segmentation

Not to be confused with values-based segmentation above, value-based segmentation groups customers based on how much revenue they bring to the business. For example, you could split customers into groups based on their customer lifetime value (CLV) or their average monthly spend.

This user segmentation type helps you understand how high-value customers act, so you can encourage those behaviors in other users. For example, if you identify that adopting certain features correlates to long-term retention (and therefore a greater CLV), you can create online courses or in-product prompts that teach new users how to get the most from them.

You can also use this type of segmentation to improve customer experience by:

• Building loyalty programs to reward high-value customers by sharing a discount code or special offers

• Giving VIPs special treatment by inviting them to events or offering beta trials of new features

• Targeting high-value, satisfied customers for paid referral opportunities

On the other hand, examining your low-value segments lets you discover missed opportunities. For example, by surveying or interviewing this cohort, you might discover that they’re not getting the results they wanted from your product because they’re not using it efficiently. In this case, you could create guides covering the best way to set up your product for specific use cases, helping these users to get a greater return on their investment—and potentially expand their usage.

3 reasons to use a customer segmentation strategy

Some common benefits of segmentation are that it helps you:

• Understand and address real customer needs. Discover what your customer base really wants. Prioritize new products or features based on what high-value customers are looking for, and create customer journeys and user experiences that appeal to different target audiences.

• Make your marketing strategy more efficient. Send the most relevant messaging to different groups of customers. Trigger marketing campaigns based on customer behavior, geographic location, or other key factors to help you appeal to specific customer needs.

• Improve customer satisfaction (and revenue). Use segmentation analysis to connect more deeply with different groups and foster long-term customer loyalty. Understand the user behaviors linked to customer satisfaction and revenue growth and find opportunities to replicate them.

Use segmentation to create meaningful customer experiences 

When you’re building, marketing, selling, and supporting a product, there’s no ‘one size fits all’. These user segmentation types allow you to get detailed insights into the pain points and preferences of different groups, so you can understand what they’re looking for, meet their needs, and deliver personalized customer experiences that drive growth.

FAQs about user segmentation types