We’re excited to announce the launch of a new customer segmentation product on Appboy! This latest update to our platform offers app developers more robust tools to understand their audience and deliver targeted communications to specific groups of people.

Customer segmentation is the foundation of a strong mobile engagement strategy. It’s based on the simple assumption that people are different and their behaviors vary when using mobile products. To better serve their needs while communicating to them in an efficient manner, it’s necessary to cluster them into smaller groups that reflect their unique profiles and usage patterns.

Nonetheless, the majority of mobile apps today lack the tools to segment their audience properly and are forced to treat everyone as if they were the same person. They promote messages, offers and content that appeal to some but not others, which alienates a large portion of their customers. Over time, this leads to notoriously low retention rates.

So how exactly does Appboy’s new segmentation product solve this problem?

First, we collect a wide range of data about your customers, including demographics, social data (eg Klout score, Twitter followers, Facebook friends), in-app behaviors (eg session length, date app was last used, OS version) and in-app purchases. You can also define custom events to reflect the unique use cases of your app. A customer profile on Appboy looks like this:

Using this data, you can create a variety of different customer segments Some of the more popular ones include recently lapsed users, social media influencers, passionate fans and high spenders.

Once you create custom segments that work for your app, Appboy then allows you to develop tailored communications for each group. Our platform brings together a robust set of marketing tools in one place, including push notifications, in-app messages, email, social, content and cross-promotion. This simplifies the effort needed to activate your engagement strategy.

When developing your campaign, you may find that different channels work better for different segments. For example, push notifications may be most effective for lapsed used, cross-promotion for high spenders and social promotion for influencers. Whatever your choice, Appboy allows to you to test, track and optimize their performance.

Segmenting your audience is a big step toward creating stronger relationships with your customers. Appboy’s new segmentation product was developed with this goal in mind, so we’re proud to launch a tool that solves one of the biggest challenges for mobile apps.

I encourage you to sign up for Appboy to take the new product for a spin. You can also read about our launch on TechCrunch.