Mobile Personalization And How To Do It Right

What is mobile personalization?

Imagine you want to buy a video game for your child’s birthday. Since the birthday is very special to you, you want to make sure that the game is perfect for your child.

You open the app of a video game store and start doing research.

The app recognizes what keywords you are searching for and memorizes the data. The more time you spend on the app, the better recommendations you get. Eventually it starts by only recommending games that fit the taste of your child perfectly. You are happy and consider using the app for Christmas too.

You could use the same narrative for many different apps: The wine app that recognizes the perfect wine for you, the bank that calculates your perfect financial plan.

We have to differentiate between mobile customization and mobile personalization.

You are walking in a hotel and book the room with the right size, view and price at the reception.That is customization.

If you walk in the hotel and they already hand you the keys for your perfect room – that is personalization.

Now let’s translate this to the world of apps.

Customization

An example for customization is the app for Medium:

You get to choose topics that interest you during the onboarding process of Medium. That data then gets used to customize your feed according to your interests.

Your recommended articles are based on your reading history to some extent, but if you want to follow more topics, you have to do that manually.

Personalization

Netflix is a famous example of personalization:

Netflix uses its algorithm to determine which movies and series are most interesting to you – based on your viewing history. They even go one step further and use algorithms to personalize artworks for each user. You don’t have to type in additional information.

How to personalize your User Experience

Personalized recommendations like Netflix and Amazon.If you watch a lot of documentaries about Design, Netflix will recommend you more documentaries about Design.

Take the location of your user into consideration.

Starbucks, for example, is using its app to show customers what songs are playing in the store that they are at right now.

And then there are personalized notifications.

They can be triggered through events, like birthdays. Or they can be combined with location, for example coupons for nearby stores.Notifications can also offer promotional deals based on the customer’s history.

Personalization is based on different factors that may vary depending on the type of your business.

Examples for these factors are: Demography, Lifecycle Stage, location and event parameters.

The right way to personalize depends on the type of your business.We will soon release a guide on “how to personalize”.If you don’t want to miss it, feel free to follow us on medium!

The effects of mobile personalization

Research institute Gartner predicts a 15% increase of profit by 2020 for businesses that successfully implement personalization.

Furthermore, personalized push notifications are 4 times more likely to be opened than generic notifications.

What about privacy concerns? Surprisingly, it is not that big of an issue. The majority of consumers (75%) prefer that their personal information gets used to improve their experience.

If you are not thinking about personalization yet, chances are your competitors do:90% of marketers believe that personalization is the future.

To track your personalization progress, and your user experience in general, you can use our analytics tool UXCam. We will provide you with Session Analysis, User Analysis and Screen Analysis. You can find out more at uxcam.com.