From Personalization to Individualization

From Personalization to Individualization

There was a time marketers were really upbeat about personalization. Although, personalization is a very broad team and makes us believe in a whole gamut of wonderful things that marketers would be doing for their customers to make the experience up-close and personal, the intimacy in reality, is a hoax. Apart from a select few companies, marketers have been doing joke of a job when it comes to one-to-one marketing or personalization. The only personalization in a mass mailing list was the name, rest all being the same. Discounting and believing, that these marketers were willing but unable, one can consider that there wasn’t much customer information available also. Mostly customer information was based on mass surveys and generalized assumptions for a particular target group.
But things are different now. Now marketers can actually know their customers and know them beyond just their name. Customers are leaving data trails all over interaction points. There is enough data and there are apt tools to correlate that data. What companies need now is the strategy for data-driven marketing. Companies, keen on providing meaningful marketing experiences to their customers, need to define the following:

• The process of gathering customer information from different customer touch-points and storing it in a central repository.


• The tools that will help turn customer data and customer information into customer knowledge.


• The strategy that will optimize this customer knowledge into a meaningful, truly engaging and enriching interaction. 

In the digital era, customer information is spread all across – in-store, online, app, customer helpline and every window that the company has. Thanks to mobile commerce, companies can also have access to detailed profiles of customers including information of their buying behavior, social group etc. Then there are technologies like geofencing that help companies understand the geography dynamics of the customer. Finding information is not a big deal, the real challenge is weaving a strategy around that information. The key to success in this hi-tech era will be adding human touch to this hi tech information and creating optimized interactions which are individualized and not just personalized.
You might also be interested in reading http://www.xymob.com/blog-detail.html?postid=4164849917444943696. 

Don’t Give Up

Tips for increasing app retention

Mobile app is just the start of a relationship the fate of which will then be decided based on how interested and engaged the user is with the app. Creating and getting downloads is not the challenge, the real challenge is engaging and retaining users. According to a research by Silicon Valley analyst, Andrew Chen, 77 percent of users never use an app again 72 hours after installing it.

Here are a few tips to help you increase user engagement and retention.

• User Profiling
As soon as the user downloads the app, right technology can help you create user profile and eventually build upon it. There are trends that suggest if the user is likely to the app for instance if the user has quit the on-boarding process or has not created a profile, or not uploaded profile picture, which means that if the user has not shown serious involvement from the beginning, chances are that the user will either uninstall or abandon the app. If these trends can be tracked in the very beginning, the user can be enticed into using the app which can improve chances of retention.


• Up Close and Personal
For every interaction you have with the user, try and make it as personal as you can. Make personal references by including their name, location or maybe some usage history, but do not make it sound creepily intrusive. Work out an intelligent strategy that has a fine mix of personalization, timing and of course the message.


• Gauge your market
One size does not fit all, definitely not on the Internet. There can be no winning formula or standard practices that will make different apps do well. In fact, apps designed in the same segment may also have to follow different marketing, promotion and interaction rules to suit their specific audience. For instance, Facebook and LinkedIn are both social media platforms, both may have same users but the placement and promotion of both the platforms is totally different. Similarly, Candy Crush may just be a candy game, supposedly good to keep kids happy for a while, but it has more adult user base than any other game in the segment. So the marketing strategy for each app has to be tailored to suit that particular audience.


• Check what went wrong
Although this is a classic, but works every time. Track your uninstalls. Analyze why users are uninstalling the app. There could be various reasons including poor onboarding, unappealing UX, complicated navigation, bugs, arid messaging or shoddy engagement strategy. If you are lucky, your users will leave a comment and let you know what’s wrong. But in most cases, users just leave. That is where technology and analysis will have to play an important role and help find out what’s wrong, so that it can be rectified whatever it is.

Need more insights into app retention and engagement? Read our blogs at www.xymob.com/blogs.