What is user segmentation?

User segmentation is the practice of dividing a product's user base into groups based on shared characteristics, so that each group can receive experiences, messages, or guidance tailored to their specific context. The groups are called segments.

Segmentation is the mechanism that separates a personalized product experience from a generic one. Without it, every user receives the same onboarding flow, the same feature announcements, and the same in-app messages regardless of whether those experiences are relevant to them.

Types of segmentation criteria

Demographic and firmographic

Role, company size, industry, plan tier. These are attributes typically collected at signup or pulled from a CRM. They are useful for high-level targeting (showing enterprise-specific features only to enterprise accounts) but have limited precision for in-product guidance.

Behavioural

Actions the user has or has not taken inside the product: completed onboarding, used a specific feature, reached a usage threshold, stalled at a particular step. Behavioral segmentation is the most powerful type for in-app guidance because it targets users based on what they are actually doing, not just who they are.

Lifecycle stage

Where the user is in their relationship with the product: new (first 7 days), activated, retained, at-risk, churned and returned. Lifecycle segmentation ensures that a user who has been active for six months does not see the same first-login prompt as someone who signed up yesterday.

Goal-based

What the user said they came to do, captured in a welcome modal question or onboarding survey. Goal-based segmentation enables the most personalised first-session experience by routing users to the onboarding path that matches their stated intent.

Segmentation and in-app experience quality

A feature announcement sent to all users regardless of role is noise for 80% of them. The same announcement sent only to the segment for whom the feature is relevant is signal. The difference in engagement rates between unsegmented and segmented in-app messaging campaigns is typically substantial.

The same principle applies to in-app surveys, onboarding flows, and contextual guidance. Showing a tooltip about an advanced feature to a user who has not yet completed basic setup creates friction rather than reducing it. Segmentation is what makes contextual help actually contextual.

User segmentation vs. cohort analysis

These two concepts are related but serve different purposes. A segment is a live group: users who currently match the defined criteria. As users' behaviour changes, they move between segments. A cohort is a fixed group: users who share a common starting point in time (the week they signed up, the month they converted). Cohort analysis is used to measure retention over time; segmentation is used to target experiences in the present.

How segmentation works in Jimo

Jimo's Audience feature enables segmentation using user attributes synced from a CRM or CDP, product events from analytics integrations, and in-product behavior tracked via the Jimo SDK. Segments are defined in the no-code interface and applied to product tours, hints, surveys, and announcements without engineering involvement.

Combined with Jimo's hyper-targeted delivery rules, segmentation allows product teams to deploy guidance that is specific to what a user has done, where they are in the product, and what they are trying to accomplish.