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Our top five tips for mobile app hyper-personalization

Alix Carman, Content Writer, Adjust, Sep 16, 2022.

Introduction

Customization and personalization are essential for mobile app marketers that want to succeed. In recent years, marketing has shifted from a product focus to shining a spotlight on the individual consumer. With a wealth of data at marketers’ fingertips, delivering a customized experience is the perfect way to develop a deep, authentic connection that attracts, engages, and converts your customers.

What is hyper-personalization?

Hyper-personalization in retail is the combination of real-time and historical customer data to form bespoke, “segment of one” content, products, services, and offers for individual customers. The deeper the level of data a company has on any individual customer, the more thorough (or hyper) their personalized experience can become.

Technology can aid notably in the use of data for the purpose of hyper-personalization. Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning and predictive analytics are commonly used to understand and anticipate a customer’s behaviors to make all touchpoints more relevant to them. The end goal is to provide a unique experience for each individual customer.

What is the difference between personalization and hyper-personalization?

Personalization is generally limited to basic data: a customer’s name, gender, and general geographic location. This could look like customizing emails with a customer’s first name or sending them a reminder that they have an item waiting in their cart for purchase. Hyper-personalization, on the other hand, uses much more detailed information to create a full picture of a customer’s interests, behaviors, and needs.

Here are a few examples of the types of customer data you can collect (when they have consented and opted-in) to deepen your understanding of an individual customer.

Active geolocation
Browsing activity
Purchase history
Active times (when they are most often using your app and/or making a purchase)

Types of data to gather for hyper personalization

Hyper-personalization could look like a push notification based on the customer’s location, an ad based on local weather at the time, coupons based on spending history, or individualized pricing.

Top-notch hyper-personalization examples

There are a few ways you can introduce hyper-personalization to your app: via your product offering, features of your app, or as a marketing strategy. We’ll take a look at a few examples from each.

Hyper-personalization as a product offering

Customize your offering itself to each individual customer. Introductory questionnaires and post-purchase follow-up questions are quite popular for this form of hyper-personalization.

For example, Stitch Fix walks customers through an initial style quiz so that a personal stylist can hand-select items for the individual. The customer is then able to share notes and feedback with the stylist to help further customize future orders.

Butternut Box personalizes its experience for both its end customers (dogs!) and the dogs’ owners. Each customer can add multiple dogs to their account and customize the type of food their dog prefers as well as get a custom measurement of food based on size, weight, and dietary needs to help maintain their health. On delivery, drivers rate the dog on how good of a boy or girl they were on the day of delivery, submit praise about their experience with the pups, and display profiles with pictures and information about their own dogs at home.

Life Time combines traditional health and fitness app features with incredibly customizable add-ons, right down to live one-on-one sessions with personal trainers within the app. Customers are able to tailor the workouts they are served based on what types of exercises they prefer, their fitness goals, their fitness level, and what equipment is available to them at home.

Hyper-personalization as a feature

Without having to change your product offering, and before you begin drilling into “segment of one” advertising, consider adding a personalized recommendation feature to your app. Here are a few that work really well.

Amazon has nailed hyper-personalization as a feature on its home page. In addition to being able to search for specific items they need, consumers are provided with purchase inspiration in over 15 sections titled things like “inspired by your shopping trends”, related to items that you have viewed in [category]”, “get yourself a little something”, and “inspired by your Wish List”.

Content streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu offer sections such as:

Recommended for you
Because you watched [title]
What to watch tonight

Among other music streaming platforms, Spotify boasts a strong recommendation engine. However, what has made the brand really stand out in the eyes of marketers is its annual release of Spotify Wrapped. Each user gets an overview of their music listening habits over the past year which they can easily share with friends and stack up against global stats.

Hyper-personalization as a marketing strategy

Lastly, there is of course marketing using “segments of one”. As these are so tailored to each individual, they can be easiest to implement using push notifications and email rather than social media or display ads.

How hyper-personalization can benefit your app

While hyper-personalization can involve a little more work upfront, the payoff is outstanding. The personalization process fosters deeper relationships with customers, leading to:

Higher quality leads
Efficient use of budget
Increased conversion
Superior customer engagement
Better customer retention
Stronger brand loyalty

Tips for developing a successful hyper-personalized model

Ready to kick-start your own hyper-personalization transformation? Here’s how to get it right:

Make a game plan

Decide whether you are going to introduce a feature or marketing strategy for your customers that creates an individualized experience. From there, determine what data you will need to gather and how you will go about the collection.
Bring a trustworthy MMP on board

There’s no need to go it alone. Hyper-personalization is all about the data, so this is where you really want to get things right. A mobile measurement partner (MMP) and analytics platform like Adjust is critical in providing the unbiased, streamlined, and high-quality data you will need.
Build hyper-personalization into the customer journey

From awareness all the way through to repurchase, you don’t need to pick just one place in the customer journey to create a unique experience. Pepper personalized moments throughout their journey based on the data you have collected.
Continually iterate

Just as we’ve seen that one size does not fit all, this is the case for the individual customer as well. Your approach will need to adapt and change as your customer does just the same in their own life.
Anticipate your customer’s needs

And lastly, start to build as strong of a prediction model as possible so that you can begin to anticipate your customer’s needs before even they do. This will provide a feeling of your brand really knowing, understanding, and caring for the customer. In turn, this deep connection helps to reduce consideration time and further fosters loyalty.

Learn more about why customer loyalty is more important than ever, and get some inspiration for how to maximize your push notifications to help get started.