If your product analytics tell you what your users do, behavioral segmentation tells you why they do it.
It’s the difference between seeing 200 users drop off last month and knowing that 150 of them abandoned right after hitting a confusing in-app paywall.
Behavioral segmentation empowers you to group users by their actions, so you can tailor onboarding flows, messaging, and features that drive adoption and retention. In fact, businesses using advanced segmentation strategies see a 10% higher customer retention rate.
In this article, I’ll walk you through behavioral segmentation examples, why it matters for product growth, and how leading SaaS companies use it.
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What is behavioral segmentation?
Put simply, behavioral segmentation refers to the practice of grouping your users based on their actions, habits, and interactions with your product.
Think about it this way: demographic data tells you that you have two users who are both 35-year-old product managers in the tech industry. On paper, they look identical. But behavioral data tells you something far more useful:
- User A logs in every day, creates complex user flows, and uses every advanced analytics feature you have.
- User B logs in once a month, creates a single checklist, and has never even opened the analytics dashboard.
Should you treat these two users the same? Of course not. User A is a power user who needs advanced tips and new feature announcements. User B is barely engaged and might need a nudge to rediscover the product’s core value. That’s the difference behavioral segmentation makes.
Personalize Every Customer Journey at Scale Using These Behavioral Segmentation Examples and Userpilot
Behavioral segmentation examples in SaaS
In SaaS, user actions speak louder than personas. You could know your customer’s job title, company size, or region, but if you’re not tracking what they actually do inside your product, you’re missing the clearest signal of intent.
That’s where behavioral segmentation divides customers based on usage patterns, product interactions, and goals. It helps you run better marketing campaigns and optimize the customer journey stage by stage.
Let’s look at real examples of how SaaS companies segment users based on their behavior and what they do with those insights.
#1 Target feature adopters for usability tests: Userpilot
Lisa, our UX researcher at Userpilot, ran into a common problem: she needed users to participate in usability interviews, but her emails weren’t getting any replies.
This wasn’t surprising as B2B users have crowded inboxes and busy schedules. The traditional email route was ineffective and slow. So Lisa opened Userpilot and set up a new in-app survey. But she didn’t send it to every user.
She built a segment based on actual feature usage, specifically, users who had interacted with the segmentation functionality. This let her target people who were already familiar with the feature and more likely to provide relevant feedback.
Lisa placed it inside the product, where users were already active and focused. Within a few days, she received 19 responses. That’s a 4x increase in participants, achieved by shifting to an in-product channel and segmenting users by actions.
As Lisa shared:
“I needed a channel where users were actually paying attention. The response was instant compared to email.”
This small behavioral segmentation helped us improve our research turnaround time, reduce delays in product development, and gather sharper insights.
#2 Push upgrades and purchasing process: Osano
Osano needed to improve the purchasing process and increase expansion revenue without waiting on dev cycles for every small experiment.
Arlo Gilbert, Osano’s founder, started by segmenting users based on their account usage behavior. The moment a user crossed a set usage limit, they were added to a segment that would see targeted in-app upgrade prompts.
These upgrade components were built directly using Userpilot. This allowed their product and product marketing teams to launch and test upgrade flows quickly, without slowing down development sprints.
Osano used behavioral segmentation for upsells and also to fight delinquent churn.
By syncing CRM data and segmenting users with overdue payments, the team triggered progressively stronger in-app messages. Starting with friendly nudges, escalating to screen takeover prompts. This segmentation strategy helped recover revenue and reduce delays in accounts receivable.
“Annoying the end-users is incredibly effective,” said Arlo. “They go straight to their billing person to remove the notice. It has a positive impact on the collection.”
#3 Understand benefits sought for product designs: Amplemarket
When you map behavior by “benefits sought,” you stop guessing what users want and start designing around the value they’re trying to reach. That’s exactly what stood out when we worked with Amplemarket.
They built a feature-rich sales platform, but users don’t always discover the product parts that match their goals. And without clear insights, the team can’t tell which features matter, which workflows cause friction, or which benefits users care about most.
After consolidating their analytics and engagement inside Userpilot, they finally have that visibility. Their product teams can see it immediately in their session replays and autocaptured events. Users aren’t randomly exploring features; they are chasing very specific outcomes. Once the team understands that, guiding users becomes much easier.
They use tooltips, hotspots, and in-app guides to surface the benefits users are already seeking. And the impact was undeniable. When you highlight the right value at the right moment, adoption jumps fast. As Awni Shamah, their Staff Product Manager, told us:
“Whenever I add a nudge to a new feature, it boosts adoption by 5x, even 10x.”
#4 Trigger action nudges based on customer journey stages: Smoobu
If you want users to take the next step in their customer journey, you will need timely nudges that match where users are and what they’re trying to do.
Smoobu is a great example of this.
Smoobu helps vacation rental hosts manage their properties, but many of their users aren’t tech-savvy. So, they needed a way to push the right actions at the right time, especially during onboarding.
Using Userpilot, Smoobu built an onboarding walkthrough that triggered immediately after signup. The goal was to help users connect one of their top five booking channels.
Smoobu then layered additional nudges for users who didn’t act. A reminder modal appeared in the second session. If a user had not yet connected a channel, a persistent banner remained visible inside the UI until they completed the step.
Each nudge is aligned with a specific customer journey stage, reducing friction and preventing users from stalling.
They didn’t guess their way through this either. The team ran an A/B test to validate whether the channel-connection tutorial actually improved conversions. One group received the walkthrough right after signing up. The other group saw nothing. In the French market, the guided cohort converted 17% higher.
As Dasha Frantz, Smoobu’s Product Designer, explains:
“I’d definitely recommend Userpilot. It allows us the flexibility to move fast, experiment, and really understand what users need.”
#5 Catch early churn based on behavior patterns: Impala
Impala’s customer success team wanted to improve activation without leaning too heavily on their developers. Their goal was to design onboarding flows that could adapt to different user behaviors and help reduce early churn.
Using behavioral segmentation, they tracked users who started the onboarding sequence but didn’t complete all the steps. This segment helped the team step in before churn risk increased.
By tagging onboarding buttons inside Userpilot, they could filter out users who exited midway. This made it easier to follow up, either with nudges or internal check-ins. These segments were reviewed regularly during customer success meetings.
“If someone doesn’t finish onboarding, we know who they are and can work to bring them back,” shared Sierra Szkrybalo, from Impala.
To get deeper insights, the team used funnel and path analysis. This showed them how users interacted with the product or service during their first few sessions and helped uncover gaps in the experience.
This behavioral segmentation strategy helped Impala improve user activation. Users who completed the onboarding flow were twice as likely to add a funder, one of the platform’s core activation events.
6 Key behavioral segmentation strategies
To get started, you need to know which behaviors to look for. While there are countless ways to slice and dice your user base, I’ve found that most valuable behavioral segments fall into one of these seven categories.
We rely heavily on these at Userpilot to guide our product development and in-app marketing strategies.
1. Usage rate and engagement level
This is perhaps the most fundamental type. It groups users based on how frequently and deeply they interact with your product. You can create segments like:
- Heavy users (power users): These are your most active and engaged customers. They log in daily, use a wide range of features, and get immense value from your product.
- Medium users (Regulars): They use the product consistently but may not have explored its full capabilities. They are prime candidates for education on advanced features.
- Light users (Casuals): These users log in infrequently and may only use one or two core features. They are at a higher risk of churn.
How you can leverage such behavioral segmentation data:
For power users, you can offer beta access to new features or invite them to a VIP community. For medium users, trigger tooltips or interactive guides that introduce them to secondary features.
And you might launch a re-engagement campaign or a checklist to encourage light users to complete key activation tasks, which is a great way to increase monthly active users.
2. Buyer/Customer journey stage
Not all users are at the same point in their relationship with your product or service. Segmenting by customer journey stage allows you to provide the right support at the right time. Common stages include:
- New users: They’ve just signed up and are in the critical onboarding phase.
- Activated users: They’ve completed key setup actions and experienced the “Aha!” moment.
- Established users: They are regular users who have integrated your product into their workflow.
- Dormant/At-risk users: They haven’t logged in for a while, or their usage has dropped significantly.
How you can leverage such behavioral segmentation data:
With Userpilot, you can automatically trigger in-app experiences, emails, or checklists based on real behavior: first-session actions, activation milestones, usage frequency, etc.
And because Userpilot offers two-way sync with both HubSpot and Salesforce, your lifecycle segments stay aligned across your entire stack.
You can push Userpilot event data into your CRM to build journeys, enrich lead scoring, or trigger automated outreach.
You can also pull CRM attributes back into Userpilot to personalize customer experiences based on deals, account status, or lifecycle stage.
3. Benefits sought
This is one of the more strategic types of behavioral segmentation. It focuses on the why behind a user’s actions. What specific value are they trying to get from your product or service?
Two users might engage with the same feature for entirely different reasons.
For example, in a project management tool, one segment might seek “enhanced team collaboration,” while another seeks “detailed progress tracking for stakeholders.”
The outcome they care about shapes what kind of help or guidance they need next to achieve value-based growth.
How you can leverage such behavioral segmentation data:
With Userpilot, you can easily collect such data through in-app surveys. What makes this powerful is the ability to ask follow-up questions based on logic or scores.
For example, if a user selects “I want to improve collaboration,” you can automatically ask what tools they’ve tried or what’s blocked them. This leads to sharper customer segments and more targeted marketing campaigns.
Once you understand the benefits they seek, you can tailor onboarding checklists, UI flows, and guides to their goals.
Users trying to increase efficiency get one path. Those trying to improve visibility get another. Aligning your product experience this way drives customer satisfaction and builds long-term engagement among loyal customers.
4. Customer loyalty segmentation
Your most loyal customers are also your most valuable. They stick around longer, engage more deeply, and often become advocates for your product or service. But to keep them, you need to understand what drives their loyalty, and how it varies across your customer base.
One of the most common ways to approach customer loyalty behavioral segmentation is through the net promoter score (NPS):
- Promoters (Score 9-10): Your biggest fans. They love your product and are likely to recommend it.
- Passives (Score 7-8): They are satisfied but not enthusiastic. They’re vulnerable to competitive offers.
- Detractors (Score 0-6): Unhappy customers who are at risk of churning and could damage your brand through negative word-of-mouth.
How you can leverage such behavioral segmentation data:
With Userpilot, you can trigger in-app NPS surveys, then use those responses for behavioral segmentation.
Promoters can be added to referral or affiliate programs. Passives can get follow-up surveys that dig into what’s missing. And detractors can trigger a real-time support message to quickly recover the experience.
Beyond NPS, you can also measure customer satisfaction using CSAT or CES surveys after specific interactions. Userpilot lets you segment customers based on those moments, too.
5. Feature adoption and usage
This is where you get really granular. Which features do your users engage with? Which ones do they ignore? This tells you what they find valuable and where there are educational opportunities.
You might segment users who have adopted your core features but haven’t touched a newly launched one. Or identify users who frequently export reports. This could hint at the need for a direct integration. Segments like these give you both tactical insight and a lens into purchasing behavior over time.
Userpilot makes it easy to build these segments using customer data, event tracking, and feature tagging. With our upcoming AI Analytics, you’ll soon be able to surface patterns automatically, without needing to dig through dashboards. You’ll get smart suggestions like which customer segments to focus on, or if your users are adopting the new feature.
👉 Want early access? Join the beta waitlist here.
These kinds of valuable insights also support your marketing efforts. For instance, you could highlight new features to engage users or run marketing strategies tailored to usage trends across different regions, roles, or even the average customer’s location.
How you can leverage such behavioral segmentation data:
Target the first segment with a tooltip or a modal that highlights the new feature and its benefits. For the second segment, you could conduct fake door testing for a new integration to gauge interest. These are simple yet effective ways to act on insights into purchasing behavior.
You can also segment users by role, region, or behavior trends and tailor marketing strategies to each group.
With AI doing the heavy lifting, teams can spend less time digging through dashboards and more time launching targeted marketing efforts that actually influence future customer behaviors.
6. Occasion or timing-based customer behavior
Sometimes, user behavior is tied to specific occasions. In e-commerce, this might be holidays or seasons.
In SaaS, it could be tied to reporting cycles (end-of-quarter), project kick-offs, or annual performance reviews. For example, accounting software usage may spike during tax season.
How you can leverage such behavioral segmentation data:
Userpilot helps you spot these patterns by combining behavioral data with event tracking and time filters.
You can trigger timely marketing messages, such as a setup guide for reporting workflows, just before quarter-end.
These are key behavioral segmentation examples that go beyond demographic segmentation, allowing you to group customers based on real behavior.
How to put behavioral segmentation into practice
Theory is great, but the real power comes from implementation. Getting started doesn’t have to be complicated. Here’s a simple, four-step process I recommend:
- Start with a goal: Don’t try to segment everyone everywhere at once. Pick one clear goal. Do you want to improve new user activation? Increase adoption of a specific feature? Reduce churn in your first 90 days? Having a focus makes everything easier.
- Track user actions: Segmenting users depends entirely on what you track. Tools that support flexible event tracking and autocapture (like Userpilot) let you capture the right signals without developer involvement. This gives you a behavioral baseline for segmentation.
- Build your segments: Once you’re tracking data, you can build your segments. Start simple. For example: “Users who signed up in the last 7 days AND have not used Feature X.” Or “Users who gave an NPS score of 9 or 10.” In Userpilot, you’ll find rich segmentation filters that allow you to target very specific user groups. Think of grouping users by purchasing behavior or layering in psychographic data from your surveys. This flexibility helps you uncover what actually drives retention, brand loyalty, or churn.
Behavioral segmentation made simple with Userpilot!
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching teams struggle with activation, churn, or feature adoption, it’s that you can’t fix what you can’t see.
Behavioral segmentation gives you that visibility. It shows you why users behave the way they do and what can move them forward.
And honestly, most teams overcomplicate it. You don’t need SQL queries, endless dashboards, or guesswork. You just need clean behavioral signals, the ability to act on them instantly, and a place where product, CS, and marketing can all see the same truth.
That’s what we built Userpilot for. It makes segmentation practical, fast, and something you can use to drive growth.
If you want to build segments that translate into real product outcomes, book a demo with us today!
Boost Customer Retention By Applying These Real-World Behavioral Segmentation Examples with Userpilot
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