How to Personalize Your App in 8 Ways

When it comes to your app’s success, user retention is as important as user acquisition. A steady growth is not only possible with acquiring as much users as possible, but also making your current users happy – at least more than your competitors do – as soon as possible. One of the most effective techniques to do this is developing and updating your app by considering that your app makes your users feel special.

Some Convincing Data & Info on Why You Should Personalize Your App

• Whatever your app category and competition in the related category is, personalizing your app increases user loyalty on a big scale. According to Econcultancy, in 2016, app personalization will be more and more important to keep your users.
• According to Localytics, 60% of users who don’t come back within 7 days will never return. This shows you should do some really smart things to increase user retention in the first seven days.
• People love discovering new apps and downloading them. However, statistics show that they don’t like to keep these apps that much. According to Flurry, an average person downloading 65 apps only keeps 15 of them per week.

So all these data shows something in common to app owners and app developers: What you should do to survive in this mass is remaining in your users’ mind! And this is very possible by personalizing your app by implementing the most suitable ones from the following ways. 

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Push Notifications

When it comes to app personalization, one of the most effective way to do it is using smart push notifications. It is one of the best way how well you know your users specifically.

 

Here are some personalized push notification content types you can prefer:

• Providing personalized special offers like discounts
• App based information that matters for your user like time of flight
• Notifications about their network in your app
• Reminders for the action they want to take
• Such data based information like location

Smart Recommendations

Just like push notifications, smart recommendations are to provide benefit to the user as well. What you can do here is using the reviews, favorites, and feedback provided by your user himself. If your user mark rock music category in your app as his favorite, isn’t is so logical to send him some rock music concert events nearby? Or why don’t you consider a review about “typing experience” as a getting new feedback with a notification after fixing it?

Location Based Personalization

It is very popular today to use localization to keep users engaged in especially shopping category. What you can do is sending notifications using the real time location information of your user. It is possible with iBeacon technology to track your users’ location.

App Onboarding

 

Considering the analytics above about the users that never return after 7 days, you have a limited time to convince your users after install. Onboarding is the best place to start this persuasion process. If you can do this process personalized for your users, it will be easier to retain them using your app. Here are some tips about making onboarding process personalized and smart.

• Take your users’ name and name them during onboarding and using your app.
• Collect their favorites to personalize their app experience in the following steps
• Provide special onboarding offers like a trial for a limited time or a discount
• Let them use your app in onboarding process like encouraging them take a photo
• Avoid asking too much personal questions – Personalization doesn’t work in onboarding if you bother your users with over do.

Timing

If you want to personalize your users’ app experience, you need to be timely. You should remind yourself in the right time, in the right place, and with the right content. Think about your travel app that send you push notification about where to go in Boston after you leave Boston. It is not only causing a bad conversion, but also leading to uninstall. If you want to be a personalized app, you should start with timing management.

Social Integration

Registration process is one of the most unlovable process of an app. Especially if you make it complicated for users, it is possible that they can uninstall your app even without seeing your app. Social integration is a good and favorite option that makes life easier for users. You can get benefit from Facebook and Twitter SDKs to integrate your registration with social media platforms. It also helps you reach some more personalized information about your users like friend database and birth date.

 

Data Based Messaging & Mailing

As I mentioned above, push notifications and smart recommendations are good ways to show how well you know your users. However, think about the outside of the box. What if you send these smart recommendations via email? For example, if you are an education app, wouldn’t that be great to send them new tests in your app via email. Especially if your users don’t like push notifications, it might be a better option to remind your app to them via a permanent mail that they can see each time they opened their mailbox.

Saving the Last Action for Reopening the App

 

Personalization means following your users and give them what they want.  Consider this: When you play out a level in your game app and shut it down, what happens when you return back to your game? Are you starting from the first level again? No, you resume. Now think this: Wouldn’t it be great if you provide this – if possible – for your app? Spotify is a good example for this. If you shut Spotify down, when you come back, you see the last song you listened. YouTube did this for the same device you use for watching a video. It allows you to resume your video after opening it again.