Strategies for Designing Personalized Mobile Applications

With over 3.5 million apps on Google Play and 2.2 million on the Apple App Store, the competition for mobile apps is intense. A way to ensure your app stands out is through personalization. 

You can ensure the customer values your product by accommodating it to their preferences and behaviors. So, how do you design a personalized application that meets everyone's demands? 

This blog will explore the answer to this question. We'll examine what personalized applications are, why we need them, and how to design them strategically for success.

What are Personalized Mobile Applications?

Personalized mobile applications can mod their interface experiences based on user behaviour.

You can use the recorded data from interaction and user history to design a personalized user experience.

For example, imagine you are purchasing a product on an e-commerce platform. When you view the product, the app tends to recommend similar products of your liking. Personalization enables the potential to engage with customers for further interactions and conversions.

Benefits of Personalized Mobile Applications

Recent studies have revealed that over 80% of users tend to keep a mobile application that offers personalized services. Furthermore, more than 72% of users expect apps to be personalized. Here are a few advantages of personalized mobile apps that make them so popular:

1. Improved User Retention and Engagement 

Attuning your content based on your user preferences keeps the demographic hooked to your app. This opens the window for you to monetize the retained user’s engagement.

2. Increased User Loyalty and Positive Reviews

When the waiter or waitress serving you at your favorite restaurant makes an effort to know your needs, you tend to feel more satisfied. The food then gets tastier, too. 

App personalization has a similar psychological impact. Users tend to feel more appreciated when your product caters to their needs. 

3. Higher Conversion Rates and Revenue from Personalized Offers

Like the case of e-commerce apps, targeted offers based on user preferences can generate growth in sales. 

Take an instance where the app gets the data that the user usually purchases and views games for PS5. Here, the e-commerce app, like Amazon, utilized this information to send special offers and discounts to the user through various channels. 

Using SMS and push notifications, you can ensure enhanced customer retention and revenue generation for your app.

Data Collection Methods for Personalization

Personalization takes place on the foundation laid by the analytics from the data collected. Let us look into the commonly used methods to collect the necessary data for personalization:

1. Onboarding Processes

Onboarding is the perfect time to gather users’ essential information. As the user enters the necessary information, your app will design itself based on the customer's preferences. 

2. Social Platform Integrations

Another easy method to collect information is to link your application's user accounts to their social media profiles. This can provide even more relevant information, such as their personal interests and connections, through their likes and other activities on these social media apps. 

In addition to these integrations, in-app trafficking of user behavior, along with surveys and feedback forms, can be an effective method of collecting data and understanding user preferences.

Addressing the Privacy Issues During Data Collection

When adopting any data collection strategy, you must consider the user's privacy. It is essential to be transparent about your actions and obtain your user's consent in this process. 

Privacy policies under regulators like GDPR ensure users have autonomy over their data. Ensuring customer privacy can build trust between users and the product. This, in turn, makes engagement and customer retention more likely.

Types of Personalization Strategies with Examples

To strategize how to personalize your product's user experience, you must first identify the type of data you want to assess. 

Depending on the data types collected to assess your product’s user base, here are some common types of personalization strategies:

1. Demographic Targeting: Gender, Age, Preferences

Demographic targeting strategy prioritizes user information such as gender, age, and preferences. 

The recommendations you receive on a health-tech app such as MyFitnessPal would depend on several other additional factors outside the basic information. This includes the user preferences, such as vegetarian diets and medical history.

Using these data, MyFitnessPal provides professional advice on diets and workouts, ensuring to meet both your personal needs and health goals.

2. Contextual Targeting: Device, Time, Geographic Location

Here, the focus is on factors such as the device, time, or location. This way, the apps provide content relevant to customers' needs, increasing engagement and revenue. 

Take Zomato, for example. The app's everyday feature shows a menu appropriate to each time of the day. While food usually served as breakfast is available in the morning, meals available at noon are different, and the same applies to dinners. 

3. Behavioral Targeting: User Purchases, Clicks, and Navigation Patterns

A strategy that strictly concentrates on user behavior; here, the focus lies on clicks, searches, interactions, and purchase history. In the context of gaming applications, some users tend to spend more time on a level. 

Offering discounts on the necessary resources can help the app generate revenue by prompting the players to purchase.

Creating Unique User Experiences

Now that your strategies are in place, it's time to look into the intricacies of creating your app’s personalized user experience. An ideal personalized application must include these trusted methods:

1. Offering Personalized Recommendations, Offers, and Loyalty Programs

Delivering personalized discounts and offers plays a vital role in enhancing your app's user experience. Adopting in-app gamification, like Google Pay's reward system, encourages users to engage more with your app. 

Additionally, health-tech apps such as Fitbit can provide weekly goals and leaderboards, upon which, if the user succeeds, they can receive exclusive offers tailored to their preferences. Such an adoption can, therefore, make users feel valued and satisfied.

2. Consistent Personalized Messaging Across Channels like SMS, Email, and Push Notifications

Another method of prompting users to engage is sending SMS, push notifications, and emails. You can monetize the user base by sending exclusive discounts and limited-time deals over these various channels. 

One such example is the e-commerce platform Flipkart. The application sends push notifications about exclusive offers on items in your cart or when a product on your wishlist is back in stock. 

Ensuring a consistent, personalized tone across these channels can keep your users engaged. Personalization can take your app to a higher notch by optimizing its user stickiness and conversion rates.

Conclusion

To ensure a complete conversion, it is essential to provide your users with the best possible experience while adopting your app. However, make sure to pick the right strategy from the above after careful consideration. It must depend on your product type, industry, and targeted demographics. 

At Plotline, we provide solutions to your app based on the industry and use case with our in-app elements such as nudges. By enhancing your app experience, we ensure that your user base builds a long-lasting relationship with your product. 

Book a demo to optimize your app to its utmost potential.