Stop Wasting Time And Start Personalization

Personalization according to Wikipedia is to tailor a service or a product to accommodate specific individuals or groups of individuals. If you think about it, personalized services exist for a long time. You can probably say it starts around when trading was just established. Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel was a fully personalized service. I am going to make a bold claim that most products are personalized before the industrial revolution. An old-time Italian shoemaker would more than likely need to create the pair of shoes after the buyer took all the measurement. However, modern-day personalization takes a pretty different form. As we spend more time online and on our phone, often times personalization take place in digital space and of course, there will be personal data involved.
When do we need to do personalization?

Access the history
This is truly about tracking user history and allow the user to access the history in an easy way. The goal of this type of personalization is to provide convenience. For example, in Netflix, one of the top few recommendations to watch is new episodes from TV series you watched recently. Specialty Cafe online ordering remembers your favorite sandwich and allows you to just “order my favorite”. Because of the convenience they provided, these services were able to gain loyalty instantly.

Choice overload

This is extremely crucial for e-commerce company or any product that has more than a dozen options in my opinion. There is already limited screen space and not to mention very limited (3–4 seconds) attention span from the user. According to George Miller, people’s working memory can only store and process 7 +-2 items at a time. Amazon is well known for its recommendation algorithm in this area. They have tons of places where they want to help you to narrow down the choices. When you log into amazon.com, they have sections like “most top pics for you”, “inspired by your recent trend”, “fun and affordable gifts” and etc. about 30% of their revenue is generated through recommendation.

Automation
I haven’t seen many products excelled in this area. With the recent development of AI and deep learning, I believe there will be more application of personalized automation. Automation is to suggest and even automatically performs an action based off user’s past behavior pattern or action preferences. Gmail smart compose is a great example. The smart compose will suggest the rest of the sentence for you to write based on your own writing as well as the content of the email.

Personal connections
The personalized message along with the timing of touch and the offers is arguably the most mature and most obvious area to use personalization. Marketers used data to segmented the marketing approaches dated back in 1920. With digital marketing, personalization techniques become much more sophisticated. Being able to talk to the user at the right time with the right message is crucial to the success of the marketing team. One famous example is when Target was able to predict a teen’s pregnancy before her dad knew about it. Nevertheless, for expected parents, it would be a nice personal touch when their favorite store sends them a warm congratulation note to their pregnancy. A successful lifecycle marketing group should be able to tailor message toward the user life journey, maybe their state of mind, and their intents and motivation.

What do people think about personalization? I did a quick survey around personalization and here are some insights from my 100 respondents.
When I asked what’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentioned personalization. Not surprisingly, the companies that are famous for their data success stories came up top: Amazon, Facebook, and Google. There are also about 20% of people mentioned specific shopping items. Here is the word cloud of the answers.

In the survey, we then asked the respondents to rank 11 personalized product or message between creepy, helpful, neutral, not helpful, or not recognize the personalized component at all. Amongst the group of services, mobile games came low in addressing the personalization in their product. 23% of the Angry bird players don’t believe the game uses data to personalize the product or message.

Of all the respondents who used the product in question and were able to recognize the personalized component, only 10% of the Angry Birds users think the personalization is helpful and 26% think it’s creepy. Not surprisingly, Amazon and Netflix took the lead in personalization: 60% of Amazon users and 58% of Netflix users find their personalization is helpful.

Lastly, the security and privacy in using users’ data are still hugely important to a company’s reputation. There are more works to be done to help the consumers to feel confident and safe to share their data. When asked whether they are comfortable with the companies using their data to create a personalized experience, only 30% of the respondents say they feel comfortable that their data are used.

Conclusion

In the past decade, the advancing of data storage and computation technology definitely helped to spread the wings of data science, machine learning, and AI and it helps the push forward personalization in digital products. Using data to create a fully tailored service seems to be achievable and maybe already achieved in many scenarios. However, we still have a long way to go in creating a personalized product that is beneficial for our users. Creating a great personalized product we need to focus on solving a consumer’s pain-point and establishing an emotional connection. I believe in the next few years the winner will belong to whoever masters the skills in the personalized product.

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