Customer segmentation and push notifications: a new Windows Dev Center Insider Program feature
We’re excited to announce that we’ve added a new customer segmentation and push notifications feature to the Windows Dev Center Insider Program. To try it out, you’ll need to join the Dev Center Insider Program if you haven’t done so already. Then, get started with an overview video to see detailed steps on how to create segments and push notifications. With this feature, you can quickly create custom notifications to send to your app’s customers—all of them, or to only a selected segment that meets the criteria you define, like demographics and purchase status. Customer segments and notifications can be used to encourage desired actions (like buying something) or for loyalty and retention campaigns, maximizing cross and up-sell opportunities, identifying product differentiation strategies and discovering what each segment finds most valuable.
When defining a customer segment, you first select a specific app. Then you can create AND/OR queries that include or exclude customers based on attributes such as app acquisitions, acquisition source and demographic criteria, with options to refine further. You can also select criteria related to first time purchase status, total Store spend, and total spend within the app you’ve selected. Most of these attributes are calculated using all historical data, although there are some exceptions: App acquisition date, Campaign ID, Store page view date and Referrer URI domain are limited to the last 90 days of data. The segment will only include customers who have acquired your app on Windows 10; if you support older OS versions, downloads on those older OS versions will not be included in any segments you create. You won’t be able to create customer segments that don’t meet a minimum size threshold, and only adult age groups are included in any customer segment.
To define a segment of your app’s customers:
- Click Customer groups from the left navigation pane of your Dev Center dashboard.
- Use a segment template or click Create new group.
- Choose your app and construct your own filter criteria.
- Click Run to apply your filters and see quick results.
- Save your segment for later use.
After you save a segment, it will become available to use for notifications after 24 hours. Segment results are refreshed daily, so you may see the total count of customers in a segment change from day to day as customers drop in or out of the segment criteria.
To send a custom notification to a segment of your app’s customers:
- Register your app to receive notifications.
- From your Dev Center dashboard, select your app.
- Click Services from the left navigation pane.
- Click Push notifications.
- Click New notification to create the notification.
- Define your notification and parameters.
- If you have not already created your segment as described above, click Create new customer group. If you have already created your segment, it will appear in the drop-down list (after 24 hours from the time you created the segment).
- Schedule the time to deliver the notification, and then click Save.
Please try it out and let us know what you think. What additional attributes would you like? What else would help? Please give us your feedback using the Feedback link at the bottom right corner of any page in Dev Center, or take our 2-minute survey.
Source: Customer segmentation and push notifications: a new Windows Dev Center Insider Program feature
