Since we launched Encharge back in July last year, our understanding of your needs has increased dramatically.
You have inspired us to re-architect Encharge and build the most powerful version of user segments we have ever released. In fact, we completely redesigned how segmentation works in Encharge.
Read on to learn more about the market’s most powerful user segmentation for SaaS companies, and how you can take advantage of it to create hyper-targeted audiences for your product.
The problem with segmentation in marketing automation tools
Most marketing automation platforms boast “powerful segmentation” features. They’re not necessarily lying.
The problem, however, is that these platforms are simply not built for the complex needs of a SaaS product (HubSpot, I’m looking at you).
What might be a powerful segmentation for a blogger, an agency, or an offline business, is usually entirely useless for a SaaS business with recurring subscriptions, and a sophisticated customer journey.
Most marketing automation tools offer segmentation only by:
- Demographics data — gender, age, location (Useful for B2C, and eCommerce)
- And Email activity — opens, clicks, replies. (Useful for newsletters).
It hurts us every time we see a SaaS startup trying to fit their needs with a tool like HubSpot, Mailchimp, Mailerlite, or Sendinblue. The exercise usually ends up with the SaaS company not sending any action-driven emails. Or equally worse, wonky workarounds — like updating custom fields with user events, in order to get user activity in the marketing automation tool.
Just to be clear, HubSpot offers segmentation based on user events on their Enterprise tier. That plan, however, starts at $50,000 a year (not a typo). For that reason, HubSpot is so far out of scope for most early and mid-stage SaaS companies, that they would not even consider it as an option.
Put simply, these tools don’t cater for the complex segmentation needs of a SaaS company.
That being said, what a powerful segmentation for SaaS looks like?
Meet the new Encharge Segments
When we were building our new segmentation feature, we wanted to offer maximum flexibility when creating new segments. Now marketers and other non-technical people can build extremely sophisticated user segments without using any workarounds.
Check out how the new segments work:
You can now build segments with 7 different types of Conditions:
- Field — Default user fields and custom fields.
- Tag — Tags applied to users.
- Email activity — What people do in your emails.
- Event — What people do or don’t do in your app.
- Page visit — What pages people visit on your website and in your product.
- Segment — What other segment people belong to.
- Group — Use sophisticated AND/OR rules to create nested groups of segments.
Let’s take a more detailed look into each type of condition, starting with the Event condition.
Event
Thanks to our API and native Segment.com integration, you can effortlessly bring user events (or user actions) in Encharge and build segments out of them. For instance, when users sign up, activate a feature, fail to reach an aha moment, or are at risk of churning.
To allow you more flexibility and precision, each Event could be narrowed down with:
- Event count — how many times the event was performed. For example, “Created more than 3 tasks”.
- Time window — within what frame was the event performed.
- Event property. Each user event has a set of properties.
For instance, the event “Signed up” might go with the properties Name, trialStartedDate, etc.
The event “Subscribed to premium” might have the property subscriptionPlan, which would allow you to create a segment of people who have subscribed to a specific plan and so on.We have covered how Events and properties work in more depth in our post on triggered emails.
Field
Encharge comes with a number of built-in fields like Company, Website, Title, Last activity, and others, that you can segment from. You can also build segments with any custom field you add to Encharge.
The beauty of Encharge comes with our native integrations with tools like Stripe, HubSpot, and Typeform. Every single answer in your Typeform survey, field in your HubSpot account, or billing data can be automatically sent to Encharge as a custom field. Use that data to enrich your user profiles and build precise user segments.
Email Activity
Segment your users when they:
- Receive an email.
- Open.
- Click.
- Reply.
- Unsubscribe.
- Bounce.
- Report an email as spam.
You can choose a specific email, set of emails, or Any email.
Want to target people that haven’t opened any of your emails in the last 60 days? Just switch on the “Event count” and “Time window”.
Page Visit
With our site tracking installed on your website, you can build segments based on what pages your users visit or don’t visit. A person checking out your pricing page more than 3 times in the last 5 days? Why not assign them to a sales rep in HubSpot and send an automated email to offer help?
Tag
Tags allow you to organize people in contextual groups based on your own preferences. You can tag people when you import a new CSV list of contacts or automatically add a tag to a person through our flows. However you do it, you can also use tags when building your segments.
Segment
Want to exclude people that belong to a different segment? Or target only people within a specific segment? You can use the Segment condition to narrow down your segmentation.
Group
With the Groups condition, you can use advanced AND/OR rules to build extremely targeted segments of people. There are no limits to who you can target with groups.
Let’s say we run a software with 3 critical user events:
- Created a project.
- Created a task.
- Invited a team member.
And we want to create a segment of people that have completed 2 or more of these actions. Often, these types of segments are used to differentiate between Engaged and Unengaged users.
If we simply use the “All of the following” rule with the 3 conditions, we’re going to segment people that have completed all of the 3 events.
Conversely, “Any of the following” rule would give back all people that have completed at least 1 of the events.
So how do we target people that have completed 2 or more of the events?
Groups to the rescue!
Using the AND/OR logic, we can create 3 different groups:
This may seem complex at first, but it’s just 3 groups with all of the possible combinations of events. That way, allowing us to target people that have completed 2 or more events.
Convert more users to customers with better segmentation built for SaaS
The new segmentation feature allows you to send hyper-targeted messages to the right audiences, so you can build better relationships with your users and turn them into customers.
We think you’re going to love this release! If you want to try the new segments, sign up for a free 14-day trial or book a quick call with us and let us show you around.
