#12 The Unexpected Secret To Building An Irresistible Product
In all the products I’ve helped build, personalization has been a theme of every research sprint I’ve ever done. People want a custom solution built exactly for them and their needs. And isn’t that a fair request?
A lot of times it comes up when users ask for “widgets they can move around” – which can work but is not always the best solution for personalization. If you’ve ever built a dashboard (bless you) you know what I’m talking about.
Sidebar: Don’t always give your customers exactly what they want, glean insights from their request to create the best solution to their problem. I see this mistake all. the. time.
Personalization creates “stickyness” in a product. When people feel something is made for them they keep coming back (+ they tell their friends).
It’s all about you, dear reader.
In the marketing world it’s better to write “YOU” than “I” or “WE”.
When what we’re selling is all about YOU then YOU believe it is for YOU. You know what I’m saying? 😉
Personalized products sell and are loved because we’re all unique and different. When companies lean into that, we believe they see us for us. We aren’t just customer #913873.
Personalization in e-commerce isn’t new but has had a huge boom in the last few years.
Curology is a skincare company boosting “personalized by experts for clinically-proven-results” – their entire differentiator in the market is their personalization strategy.
If you watch the bachelor then there’s a good chance you’ve seen a Care/of advertisement on your Instagram. Their quiz results in a suggested daily vitamin pack and their H1 on their website reads “Personalized Vitamins” using the magic word front and center, yet again.
Personalization is not just an e-commerce strategy. It’s pivotal to some of your favorite top performing platform products as well– like Netflix and Spotify.
Personalization on most platform products is due to the algorithm (or machine learning) that looks at your behavior– like your listening or viewing history. This is often combined with an onboarding sequence or process that captures your preferences.
A good rule of thumb here: only ask questions and capture data that you are able to use to personalize an experience and make it better for the end user. It’s all about providing value!
What about community-products?
There is so much opportunity for personalization in the community-product space.
Here are a couple of community-driven platform examples that are doing it well:
Good Reads is a social network for book lovers that offers personalized book recommendations based on your reading history and preferences. It will also give you customized reading lists and book clubs based on the your interests.
Strava is a social network for athletes that offers personalized training recommendations and challenges based on your fitness level and goals. The platform uses user data and machine learning to provide customized training plans and workout suggestions.
This is why I recommend letting sub-communities thrive. A sub-community can be an excellent way to personalize a user’s experience. In a world of different views and millions of paths to walk down, community helps us find our tribe and feel belonging.
There is a magic moment when you feel both belonging and like something was made for you.
Put theory to practice & personalize your product
Let’s say you want to build personalization into your product or offering. Where do you start?
Research & segment your users
Create unique experiences for each result
Outline how you’ll capture the data
Launch, learn & improve
Let’s break these down further 💥
01 Research & segment your users
Who are your members, customers or audience? What makes them unique? As you do research you’ll start to notice trends and can categorize them into groups. Create groups based on their:
pain points
challenges
behaviors
interests
goals
and any other category that is relevant. If you’re just getting started try to keep this to 3 groups.
In a more sophisticated model, especially one leveraging machine learning, you will have more unique experiences (like no two experiences are the same). Have you ever looked at a friend’s Netflix home page? While this is the gold standard of personalization, starting simple is key.
02 Create unique experiences for each result
Outline or mock-up a different experience or result for each group that you’ve created.
If you can, take time to do some testing with these groups and get their feedback before you implement each solution. This will save you time and money down the line. This is crucial if you’re custom coding different experiences. The bigger the changes, the more important the pre-launch testing strategy.
Once you have each experience designed and planned create a matrix based on the different groups you outlined in step 1. What questions do you need to ask and what do you need to learn in order to figure out which experience to give them?
03 Capture the data
The more you can capture about actual user behavior, the better, but we don’t all have an army of developers building a machine learning algorithm– and that’s ok. In product we love a good duct tape situation.
There are many great examples of ways to capture data:
Email sequences (tag users in your CRM)
Quizzes - try a tool like Interact
Onboarding questionnaires
If you don’t have a custom platform then use an automation tool like Zapier to take the results and assign the user the correct solution based on the matrix you’ve outlined.
04 Launch, learn & improve
Experiment, baby! Get feedback. Learn what works and what could use improvement. Continuously make it better. Personalization is a never ending game because your users will always evolve and you can always make their experience better.
Look at the proportions – if the majority of your members have one experience, there might be an opportunity to break that group up further.
If you try this I’d love to hear how it goes for you and if you have any questions I’m happy to answer them! Send me a note or if you’re subscribed to my newsletter just hit reply 🙂
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