App Personalisation: What does it actually mean?

Personalisation seems to be the hot topic of discussion when considering digital marketing, but what does personalisation actually mean? AppMakr (2015) says that personalisation tailors various content depending on data from an individual. Each version will be different as the data will be unique. “Think of it as targeted advertising, but with an even higher degree of specificity.” (AppMakr, 2015)

Purchasing products via a mobile application has become increasingly popular over the last few years. Magrath and McCormick (2013) have recognised this trend and mention, “it is vital that retail marketers manage and design a mobile marketing strategy that can successfully take advantage of the rapid expansion of the ubiquitous selling channel.”

Three steps to create your personalised app

Localytics (2015) have created a really simple yet well explained three-step guide on how to create your perfect personalised app. The following points have been briefly explained however the full guide can be downloaded from here for further information.

  1. Data gathering to understand your customers

First things first, getting to know your customers, but how to do this? Data that the users have supplied to the app initially will provide the basis of ‘profile data’. This includes the usual demographics such as age, gender and location, but also in-app settings and preferences. The next type of data to collect is ‘behavioural data’; these tend to include what the user does when on the app such as the pages they view. There are several platforms available to help gather the necessary data, one in which is called Profiles. However, in order to fully understand your customer, the data collection needs to go wider than just the app. By making it multi-channel will benefit both yourself and the final personalised result for the user. The image below should help to clarify the types of data needed.

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Source: Localytics. (2015a) How to use personalisation to create great app user experiences. [Online], <http://info.localytics.com/how-to-use-personalization-to-create-great-app-user-experiences> [Accessed 10th April]

 

  1. Use data to create groups of similar audiences

Next you have to actually use the data collected in step one to create some sort of beneficial outcome. The easiest way to do this is to segment the data by various common attributes between users and what this means for your app and the audience. Gather some key correlations here, as “segmenting is the key between analytics and marketing” (Localytics, 2015a).

Screen Shot 2016-04-18 at 21.48.22

Source: Localytics. (2015a) How to use personalisation to create great app user experiences. [Online], <http://info.localytics.com/how-to-use-personalization-to-create-great-app-user-experiences> [Accessed 10th April]

 

  1. Launch personalised marketing messages

Finally, to launch the personalised marketing messages you should aim to start with segment-based campaigns. These will be the easiest to distinguish, as you should already be aware of common interests and profile/behaviour data. Push messages and in-app messaging are the best marketing tool a company can use within an app. Automation is another way to get messages across to the users. This is based on behavioural data, for example, when a user views a page a certain number of times, or added a particular item to the basket, the app will send an automatic trigger message offering a discount (or any other kind of message). However, to keep users truly engaged, these campaigns will need to be run across channel, and consider other outlets such as the website and stores.

Screen Shot 2016-04-18 at 21.48.41

Source: Localytics. (2015a) How to use personalisation to create great app user experiences. [Online], <http://info.localytics.com/how-to-use-personalization-to-create-great-app-user-experiences> [Accessed 10th April]

 

How can personalisation help consumers?

Personalisation of smartphone applications can bring a whole host of benefits to the consumer as well as the organisation. The Filter (2015) comments that if the consumer believes that the app experience has been tailored to meet their needs, they are more likely to engage with the product or app.

When searching online for news or products a user would typically spend 8 minutes reading online compared to a 30-50 minute span that they might spend if reading the news in print (Chung, Wedel and Rust, 2016). Personalisation of apps and websites will help to grasp the shorter attention span of the individuals when they are online.

A key personalisation example as discussed by Chung, Wedel and Rust (2016) is the use of personalisation in reading the news. Many of the largest websites offer personalisation on both their website and their app, however these tend to be self-customisable, allowing the customer to tick what news categories would be most beneficial for them. Automatic personalisation has started to infiltrate into the industry with some sites starting to display news articles based on the users reading history. Drippler and News360 are amongst the first few to utilise personalised news.

IRMG (2016) provide a downloadable guide to personalisation, stating that year-on-year there has been a 320% increase in sales by a mobile device as it gets the information needed to the consumer faster. What wouldn’t be beneficial about that? Having accessible, relatable information at your fingertips.

 

Risky business

Personalisation can bring a lot of risk, again to the customer and the brand. Privacy is a key policy that everyone is concerned with, especially following hacking scandals and data mistreating. Agreeing to permissions in apps is easy, a little pop up that prompts that you should agree to provide your location and access to your photos and other private data is easy to accept. Before you really know what they are going to be used for, you’ve supplied a host of information to the brand, which you may or may not want to do (The Guardian, 2013).

There are however several types of personalisation which will not breach your privacy – whether you’ve agreed to or not – and those include campaigns such as the Heinz’s Get Well campaign and Coca Cola’s Share a Coke campaign according to The Guardian (2014a). The result? A personalised gift with no user data needed.

Blog 3.4

Source: Grey Coffee, (2013) Sharing a Coke this summer – or advertising their brand through their customers? [Online], <http://greycoffee.co.uk/website-design-and-development/2013/05/sharing-a-coke-this-summer-or-advertising-their-brand-through-their-customers/> [Accessed 16th April]

 

The good, the bad and the ugly

There are several apps that have been successful at personalising the customer experience, two of the top rated apps for personalisation are Starbucks, and Nike+ Running. Have a little look at Marketing Magazine (2016) for a few more successful apps that are delivering exceptional and unique experiences for the customer.

Not all are a success though; there are also apps that have not adopted the new trend and those that haven’t done it well. For example, Pintrest sent out emails to everyone who had ‘pinned’ anything about weddings, however most of these were irrelevant as they were younger girl using them as inspiration (Entrepreneur, 2014). By not using customer data correctly, or correlating with other user information this is a perfect example of a company who delivered personalised content wrong.

To sum up, personalisation of apps is great if you can get it right.

 

References

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