App personalization is the practice of building an app to meet the requirements of specific users. It aims at elevating user experience by offering a unique experience to everyone instead of a one size fits all approach.
Given the rising competition in the market, personalization can help app owners to boost user engagement, retention and a greater connection with the audience.
The experts of digital marketing services go yet another step to assert that app personalization can be leveraged to personalize marketing campaigns and thereby appeal more to the audience. As you can see, the benefits of app personalization are multifold. Today, let’s explore how to personalize the user experience on a mobile app.
A Guide to Personalizing UX on Your Mobile App
Before setting out to personalize your app, make sure to collect user data. Some of the things that you need to take into account include age, profession, gender, location, user preference, in-app behaviour, actions, and interactions to multi-channel marketing campaigns. Analyzing diverse data points will help you to acquire actionable insights and implement them into the app.
Once you collect adequate data, pay attention to the patterns and create groups of similar users. This process is called user segmentation and it makes the app personalization process easier.
In the following sections, we will explore handpicked app personalization strategies that the professionals at any mobile app development company hold in great esteem due to their efficacy.
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First-Time Launch
Depending on your app category and quantity of demographic data points, you deliver a personalized UX on the app homepage.
For instance, apps like Pinterest or Spotify lets the users choose their preferred language, genres, favourite artists, and so on to curate a personalized list of content recommendation on the home screen. It increases content consumption to a greater degree and thereby enhances users’ time on the app.
If you leverage this feature, make sure to enable the users can change their preferences easily. That way, your app will be a go-to place for the users for any mood and requirement.
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Personalized User Journey
You can leverage parameters like gender, geolocation, timezone, seasons/weather, user behaviour, buyer persona (especially for eCommerce apps), etc. to personalize graphics, banner image, offers, trending items, etc.
All of these make the user journey smoother. For instance, various eCommerce apps create a gender-based banner on the home page. Food delivery apps may feature lip-smacking snacks during the rainy season by tracking the geo-location of a specific user. As you can understand, these can directly impact the conversion rate.
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Improved Search
A search made by the users on your app is a potent resource of user intent – the intent to perform an action. Easing the search process by leading the users to what they want enhances the user experience to a great degree. This is a personalization feature since the users may look for different things in an app.
For instance, as soon as we start typing “women shoe” in Amazon’s search bar, the search autocomplete shows a list of various predictions including running shoes, casual shoes, sneakers, and so on.
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Recommendation List
Have you noticed how Netflix curates their recommendation list? Just open Netflix from two different users’ account. You may see a difference between the movies/web series recommended for each of them.
The recommendation list is curated by taking specific user’s preferences into account. And unlike the first pointer we mentioned above, here the recommendation list is built over time. the users may not specify whether they prefer to watch a specific genre of movies but over time, the app can get an insight into which type of movies a user is watching the most.
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Contextual Recommendation
This type of recommendation is mostly used by the experts of mobile app development services while building eCommerce applications. Have you noticed how Amazon shows flip cover or grip holder as soon as you add a smartphone to your cart? Such recommendations depend on relevance. This is an effective cross-sell strategy that you may want to leverage in your app.
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Cross Channel Marketing
This is the final and perhaps the most crucial aspect. As we say time and again, a mobile app is an extension of your business, it is not a separate entity. Therefore, the insights you get in your app, make sure to use them in multiple digital touchpoints.
Here are a few ways to trigger further user engagement with personalized content:
- Trending recommendation – These are generated by the most trending activities in your app.
- Best selling recommendation – These are triggered by the highest selling items in your app.
- ‘Suggested for you’ recommendation – These are tailored to individual user’s behaviour in your app. For an eCommerce app, these may feature the recently viewed products, abandoned cart, etc.
You can also use these insights to personalize the homepage of your app. It will compel the users to check out the content.
Wrapping Up
With numerous applications available around, users have the propensity to switch between apps in the same category to execute a single task. Therefore, you need to grab their attention and make them accomplish an action without any hassle. App personalization helps you progress towards that. By leveraging it, you can ensure to showcase the elements on top-of-the-sight that instantly attracts a specific audience and thus improves conversions.
We hope that the above-mentioned pointers will help you to personalize your app. Let us know your thoughts.
