App Personalisation: What is it and why does it matter?
Gone is the time when the marketers used to take a spray-and-pray approach to their campaigns. In today’s hyper-connected, on-the-go digital ecosystem, marketers endeavour to create meaningful conversations with the users based on their location, shopping behavior and demographics. According to a study conducted by CMO Council, 68% of millennials consider their smartphones to be a personal device. Today’s customers expect businesses to create and deliver personalised experiences on mobile.
Why Should You Care?
There are millions of apps out there vying for consumers’ attention. Personalisation helps your app to cut through the clutter and make it to the mobile screens of the target audience. Personalisation is the future of mobile. It is imperative to deliver personalised user experiences or else your app will just be another number.
Simply put, personalising involves refining the user experience according to his/her preferences. Obviously, the more relevant your messages and recommendations are, the more credibility you earn among your target audience, resulting in higher engagement. In a way, mobile ecosystem is governed by the simple rule – The better the personalization, the deeper the engagement.
Personalisation Tools
App personalisation serves two purposes at once – The users save their time on skimming the right content and businesses get to focus on that section of the audience that is most likely to convert. The key personalisation tools in an app marketer’s kitty are push notifications and in-app messages. Getting push notifications right is a bit tricky. It only works when the right message is sent at the right time to the right users in the right place.
Personalising your app’s content based on customer’s location has also proved to be effective to grow engagement. It simply involves designing an outreach that’s specific to users according to their location. Here’s a good example – Hey Linda, you are near Amsterdam. Drop in at our shop and get 20% off on hot burritos right away.
There are other ways of personalisation. Addressing your users by name is one. That might not sound very important but it is. Making recommendation to the users based on their shopping history and recently viewed items is another way. E-commerce giants know it and making quite a fortune out of it. Localising your app works well too for building intimacy with your target audience. Choose an app builder that lets you to build your app in multiple language to cater to the tastes of your local audience.
What about the challenges? Getting users to sign-up to your app is the first step to create and deliver personalised experiences. But many a times, the users choose not to sign up because it seems like a long process or simply because they don’t feel like it. An online app maker that lets your users sign-up through your facebook account removes the hesitation barrier, making the step a bit easier.
Don’t Overdo It
Users expect businesses to deliver personalised content so they let them access their personal data. But that doesn’t mean you can creep them out by being intrusive. As a business, you ought to identify the thin line between informing and bothering your uses. Misusing their personal details will only push them to delete your app altogether.