App Personalization – The Must Have Factor of Mobile Apps

What does app personalization mean?

Generally, app personalization is the process of building a mobile app, especially to meet the requirements of the specific audiences. As like other kinds of personalization, app personalization also aims to present users with different experiences, which will satisfy the customers’ needs accordingly. Altogether, a personalized app meets all the user’s needs.

Why is it important?

Usually, the app space is very crowded and the user expectations are growing at the increasing rate. Till 2015, there are about 1.5 million apps in the app store and 1.6 million apps in the Google Play Store. It is found that, if an app is selected and installed, about 65% of the users will delete the app after the first use if it results in a negative experience. Generally, a person will have about 65 apps on their mobile devices and they will use only 15 of them in a week.

There is no valid reason to predict the above statistics will change. In this situation, it is important to make sure that the app meets all the user’s requirements. By doing this, the app will be unique and it can have good reach among the users and users will start to use on a regular basis. There are many tactics when it comes to the matter of app selection; they are app discover ability, performance testing, and many others. Now app personalization is added to the list.

App personalization has become one of the best ways to build an app that many users will enjoy using it.

Mobile is growing at an increasing rate and there are many buyers who access the information with their mobile devices. About 89% of the user’s media time is spent on the mobile apps. It is vital for a company to be on board with a mobile app strategy. Mobile apps behave in a unique way than other mediums.

Approaches to app personalization

• Understand the users clearly

The ultimate aim of the app developing team is to achieve positive results in their developments. For mobile this means, covering large users more time spent on the app, higher conversation rates, higher ratings, etc. in order to cherish the growth of these trends, the app developing companies have to provide their users with the different features, which will engage them and continue to have them in the future such as, video tutorials, notifications and coupons. The main thing is that they have to stay personal with them.

The companies can gather a lot of valuable information about the users, if the company follows the right mobile engagement solution and analytics in the correct place. The companies can gather all the users’ information. It starts from finding their physical location, the last time the user opened the app, how much time the user has spent in the app and to which features they went inside the app. providing the users with the relevant content will help them to have a good user experience while using the app.

There are other social marketing solutions available, which will help the companies manage their in-app and push notifications. But the companies should focus more on how to have the conversation with the users than thinking about how to create the in-app message. There are three levels of data the companies should consider they are,

• General usage

When did the user last visit to the app? How long was the session?

• Behavior

What the user did or didn’t do in the app? Which screens the user visited and what did they see in that?

• Back-end data

Companies can integrate all their channels so that they can sync their back-end data such as age, gender, and preferences.

• Conversations vs. single messages

Practice is nothing but, changing the message into the user’s real-time activity. But in the world of the apps, it means that providing users with contents, which relates to where the users have been there in the app and finding whether the users performed the actions which the company is expecting them to perform.

In most of the cases, the app communications are based on a single flow of actions when the app owner wants to display a message. Even if the messages are presented in a personalized manner and segmented in groups, they will have a clear and concise CTA as opposed to an ongoing conversation. For the user, these conversations will be informative, entertaining or educational. Many apps are not seen with the in-app engagement flows, which will provide many steps in communication that will listen and respond to the user’s idea or feedback.

The mobile marketers should respond in a different manner to each and every user’s feedback. For example, if the user fills the satisfaction in a positive way, then the company could allow the user to rate up to the app in the app store. If the fills the survey in a negative way, the company could ask the user to provide more information or provide a special offer for them to increase the level of satisfaction.

These kinds of the in-app engagement flows are similar to the email support campaigns and can direct the users to move towards the loyalty ladder.

• Experiment, test and optimize

The primary and the ultimate factors in marketing are constant testing and optimization. Marketers test subject lines, visuals layouts, etc. marketers can experiment with different flows. They can experiment with nurturing order; they can constantly optimize the content and scoring system.

How to apply this process in a mobile app? In addition to testing the app’s content, the marketers should experiment with messaging frequently, they should maintain the timing, in-app location feature and they should test different engagement features against each other.

Development teams mainly focus on the core functionality of the app and they have less focus on the engagement features, which drives people to convert and return. This will act as an obstacle in the path of the app personalization. This obstacle has to be overcome. All the app owners need a solution, which should enable them to communicate, maintain and convert personalized relationships with the users without having the need to depend on the development teams.

There are some mobile platforms available, which will allow the marketers to do without coding. But this process will go deeper rather than having a correct solution. In this time the mobile app industry will move in the parallel handling. On the one side, the development team will manage the core functionality of the app. On the other side of the coin, the product and marketing teams will own the customer experience. Marketers can’t deliver the high-level of customer experience that the end-users will expect from an app unless they have a high level of independence and the flexibility they have on other channels.

Almost all the mobile customers are looking for the best overall user experience. According to the research, the stakes are high. There is a positive mobile experience, which contributes greatly to online purchase decisions and brand loyalty. And in the future years, users will expect the businesses to do better personalization and they ensure that the personal information of the users is secure.

At present, mobile is eating the entire world. App personalization is one of important needs that an app needs. In the future, personalized mobile apps will hit the mobile market and they will dominate in the field.

Anand Rajendran is CEO and Co-Founder of Zoplay scripts, best PHP scripts development company located in India. Zoplay is a part of Casperon Technologies a leading social and mobile development company. I’m a Tech geek, Digital marketing expert, Entrepreneur, and Atheist who loves to write everything about PHP Scripts and mobile application development.