The Appeal

Personalization, when done right, can be a very impactful feature that drives a business’s success. People love things that are tailored to them; it makes them feel special, feel seen. This alone can be a significant enough factor that drives sales. But it can become even more potent when it adds to the user’s experience more functionally. Although it can be challenging to implement and expensive, it can also yield significant benefits to your ROI.

Done Right

Some examples of companies that do personalization extremely well include Spotify, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Although they use different metrics based on their exact service/product, in the end, they are able to increase the amount of time and money spent on their application because of personalization. For example, Spotify utilizes personalization to allow its software to make suggestions about other songs that the user may appreciate. This keeps the user hooked onto this service because they are continuously finding value out of it. If Spotify were to remove this feature, it would be reasonable to think that several of the users would churn due to the amount of friction that may come along with trying to find similar music manually.  TikTok is somewhat similar in the sense that the “algorithm” pushes content it believes the user will enjoy. This also allows the app to have very strong targeted advertisements. When these advertisements consistently hit the correct market, it is much easier to make a sale. LinkedIn, on the other hand, may use personalization to help with the job market. It can recognize patterns in what the users value, and align job postings with this. This will directly increase the success rate that LinkedIn has, and because it improves the functionality of the app directly, it also increases its value.