True App Personalization Is a Powerful New Engine for Customer Engagement

Apps and a mobile-first world have put engaging user experiences at the top of the priority list for today’s smart, successful businesses. If your company doesn’t offer an intuitive, user-friendly app that delights the consumer based on the time, the place, and just as importantly, the person using it, you’ve lost a huge opportunity to build brand loyalty.

Over the last few years, there’s been an overwhelming drive toward the personalization of the customer experience, especially among mainstream consumer apps for entertainment, shopping, news, travel, social media and more. And the top apps across categories are all pushing hard to make sure their users are highly engaged and enjoying an ultra-tailored user experience.

With new apps surfacing every day, and each one furiously fighting for top ranks in app stores, developers have to start thinking deeper about personalization in their design and build on the advances of pioneers like Amazon and Pinterest. Whether your app is due for an update or it’s the latest game changer, keep in mind that your users want to see content, products and services that are serendipitously relevant to their lives … and personalities.

Amazon started a revolution through its use of historical data to customize a user’s home page – an approach that has been adopted across categories. But referring to a user’s past actions does not necessarily reflect their desires today. Sure, some brands have many, many years of consumer data to pore over and can draw some fairly accurate conclusions from it, but most up-and-coming companies don’t have that luxury. All it takes is one random holiday gift purchase or the odd Facebook page “like” to throw off the predictive analytics for a user’s preferences. Those actions really only reflect what a specific computer or mobile device has been used to browse or purchase, not necessarily who the user actually is or what their true interests might be. 

That’s where the next wave of personalization comes in. We’re now able to present consumers with personality assessments that can be done in minutes, and easily integrated into any app, mobile or otherwise. Companies can now identify the actual, core personal tendencies of their users based on who they are as a person and how they really self-identify. This gives a company invaluable insight into their user base on a much deeper level than demographics and user history alone. 

At the same time, engaging consumers with a personality assessment as part of the onboarding process can help to make them feel more personally invested in the relationship with your brand.

There’s a clear line between serendipity, or elegant personalization, and creepiness. The personalization tools of the past, such as behavioral data and viewing history, truly can often border on the creepy, resurfacing the focus of an ancient shopping spree, or the browsing habits of a houseguest. Today, with true personalization, developers are building sophisticated apps that can be perfectly aligned with any of the seven basic personality types, or any combination of them.

And it really works. Smart brands are building in personalization at a deeper level, and it is paying off big in terms of customer engagement and the brand loyalty and sales that come with it.