When you just developed your beautifully polished application, it is time to promote your application and encourage users to download it. There are many ways of doing it but let’s focus today on one particular aspect of increasing the number of downloads of your mobile app – personalization.

Personalization in your mobile application

When you come into an Italian restaurant (or more probably call them or visit their website) and order a margarita with extra cheese, that’s customization. When you come into an Italian restaurant and they are already ready to hand you the pizza you like, that’s what we call personalization. It is an incredible method to grow brand loyalty. Forbes Insights together with Arm Treasure Data surveyed 200 marketing leaders and 40% of them confirmed that personalization had positively influenced their sales.

When you want to introduce personalization into your mobile app, that can include discounts and personalized offers, push notifications, recommendations, tips, and many more. More and more applications offer a highly personalized experience and it is worth your consideration if you want your digital product to become successful. 

How can you introduce a personalized experience in your mobile app?

Let’s look into several examples of engaging mobile applications that introduced well-thought personalization aspects and get inspired. They are proofs that personalization works! 

Nike’s personalized experience

Nike is a sports brand that redesigned one of its apps to make more room for mobile app personalization. Its fitness app, Nike+ Run Club, was completely redesigned. This allowed users to select a workout plan, that then adapts (automatically) depending on the progress a user makes. In general, users choose their goals, and as they are on their way to achieving them, the app tracks their progress. Then the algorithm uses the information about it to tailor the workout for the best results. It works almost similar to a real fitness instructor but this one can fit into your pocket. This level of personalization prevents users from abandoning an app for similar digital products on the market. Moreover, when it comes to sports the personalization is crucial. Everyone has a different body and there is no option to create a workout that will suit everyone and help them achieve their aims. 

Spotify’s personalized playlists

Spotify is undoubtedly a leader in personalized digital experiences. It is a streaming music service available on mobile and web apps. Spotify uses information about listener behavior and patterns to present you with personalized playlists that have titles and descriptions. This helps customers see why they were offered certain songs. Every user has not only weekly recommendations that disappear if you don’t save them but also provides you with an annual summary that is often shared across social networks when the year is about to end. 

That is not all, in January 2021 company bought a patent for a new technology that will take personalization to a whole new level. It will allow the streaming platform to make observations about the user’s environment as well as emotions using speech recognition technology. Then, Spotify will be able to play music that reflects the mood and social environment of its customers. 

Dedicated health recommendations 

The Flo app monitors women’s health based on data provided by users. When a woman signs up, she is asked many health-related questions starting with a question about her purpose – tracking menstrual cycle or planning to get pregnant and tracking ovulation. Flo uses AI to precisely analyze the provided data. Thanks to this technology, it can give personalized advice and send useful notifications about a user’s health. Additionally, the mobile application is able to identify diseases by analysis of the cycle and painful symptoms a woman reports. The study from 2019 reports that 9 000 women who used the app and track their health with it, based on Flo’s recommendations later went to a gynecologist. Almost 1500 of them were then diagnosed with endometriosis, ovarian cysts, and thyroid disease. It is clear that personalization can be highly beneficial for our health as well! 

Personalized in-app search experience

All searches made in an app by a user are great signals of intent. It may be the will to buy your product, book a holiday, read your tips, and many more depending on your product. 

If you want users to value your product and engage with it more it is good to take care of their experience while searching. Amazon’s app provides one of the best experiences when it comes to personalized searches in a mobile application. It shows relevant sub-product categories that are relevant to a particular user based on their purchases and search history. 

What is more, Amazon’s home screen also features items inspired by users’ shopping trends, like past searches and purchases. The application also has an ‘Interesting Finds’ section, where users can find items suggested by their shopping history and items they’ve “liked”. This lets the user have a much more active role in the personalization features in the app.

Unique suggestions for users

Mallzee is a Europe-based marketplace application for popular clothing brands. The company has a highly innovative approach to personalization that drives sales. It uses a Tinder-like mechanism (swiping left or right) for various pieces of garments. The application then collects the data on user’s preferences (fav brands, preferred colors, style, etc.) and sends unique suggestions of what users can probably enjoy wearing to purchase. The algorithm minds also price range as a crucial factor in decision-making before purchase, therefore it sends notifications when the particular item has been discounted. As a result, users get extremely accurate and perfectly personalized offers with clothes they like. It sounds like heaven for those who are not keen on shopping. 

Selected content to explore

Instagram is a popular social channel, but its success is based also on personalization. An app makes it easy for users to find the content relevant to them in the explore tab. The shown content is based on their search history, profiles they follow, etc. Moreover, the content in the feed they see is also personalized based on the profiles users interact the most with. Instagram notifies users when somebody likes their posts, or starts to follow them.

Relevant and personalized notifications are also crucial elements that create users’ engagement and motivate them to spend more time using an application.

Personalized entertainment

In 2016 Snapchat launched the Bitmoji app which lets users create cartoonish avatars of themselves that then may be featured as their Snapchat profile picture and on the Snap Map if allowed. After that, an autogenerated daily Story has been launched as well in its Discover feed, called “Bitmoji Stories.” When you want to explore it, you are able to see a series of images similar to comic-book that show a story about your Bitmoji avatar. Moreover, if you recently communicated with a friend with a Bitmoji, you may also see your friend in your daily Story. That is a great level of personalization that highly engaged users. 

How can you implement a personalization strategy?

So now you know how personalization in various mobile apps can look like, it is time to prepare your digital product to provide some personalized experience. For successful implementation, it is worth thinking about your business model, how your product works, and what personalization tactics can drive you more revenue. 

First of all, you have to know your target audience. You need to know, what are their pain points, what kind of content or feature will make their lives easier, and engage with your app, building loyalty to it. 

When your audience is defined, select the most suitable personalization options. There are various ways to provide personalized experiences within an app, but the main thing is to pick the approach that best suits your business needs. For example, Starbucks uses personalization based on a user’s GPS data, Amazon search intents, Malzee fashion preferences. 

When you decide on your personalization options, it is time to secure users’ data.

To introduce personalization in your mobile app, you need to collect data, so you have to convince users to share selected personal data with you. This is a risk you have to take care of – customers’ concerns about the privacy and safety of their data can limit or even stop any personalization ideas. But no worries, there are ways to secure users’ data and build their trust on this issue. Especially, if you are able to protect users’ data properly and prevent any leaks of them. To know more about this subject, read this blog post.

Contact

Do you want to know more about mobile app development?

Talk to us!

Personalization driving your app’s success

In order to gain the full benefits of users’ loyalty software, consumer-facing companies have to create personalized experiences consistent with their brands. They have to tailor them to their customers’ needs knowing their audience inside-out. What is more, experiences are getting more and more important, we prefer to receive them instead of getting physical things more and more often. So remember about personalization while creating your digital product, especially if you wish your mobile app to thrive and grow its user base.