Effective Personalization in Health & Fitness Apps Demands Advanced Analytics
If you didn’t know it by now, personalization in health and fitness apps is crucial to user engagement, user retention, and ultimately, the success of the app. How do you go about accomplishing effective personalization for your health and fitness app users? The first and most crucial element you’ll need will be a way to collect data, analyze that data, and segment it. That could prove to be a lengthy, resource-consuming effort if you don’t have an advanced analytics and data collection system in place. In this article, we’ll go over some ways that health and fitness app developers and marketers alike can improve their apps with personalization, and how to do so. We’ll also talk about why having an effective analytics and data collection system in place is essential to achieving this personalization.
Why Personalization?
There’s no denying that today’s consumers expect personalization in every aspect of their lives — whether it’s artificial intelligence-based recommendations from Netflix or Amazon, designing our own pair of Nikes or Levis, restaurants that cater to every dietary need, or devices that track every move we make — including requesting help if we’ve fallen or our heart rate is in the danger territory. Personalization is the trend that’s everywhere we are — you can begin your day scrolling through a newsfeed based on your preferred outlets and reading history, make a trip to your closet for a stylist-recommended outfit per your online style profile, then head out the door with a personalized playlist coming through your headphones. And when it comes to health, wellness, and fitness, personalization continues. Personalized wellness is “a means of providing individually informed and precisely tailored care.*” It’s a puzzle-piece approach meant to match a person’s unique set of clinical data and diagnoses, lifestyle variables and preferences, and/or personal health goals. These factors are collectively being tapped in order to develop a new generation of diet recommendations, exercise regimens, stress management programs, and the like tailor-made for the individual user. And, personalization is a trend that’s here to stay — a 2018 study of US consumers showed that 90% find personalization appealing. Let’s look at an example from the personalized nutrition world. In the fight against obesity, diabetes, and other preventable diseases, researchers and scientists all agree that there isn’t a ‘one-size-fits-all’ fix. Not long ago, we believed our genetic makeup was predetermined and simply a biological reality. However, the emergence of epigenetics has shown that our genes are fluid and are shaped by our behavior (such as diet, exercise, stress management, and other lifestyle and environmental choices). This means what we do is much more important than our genetic map. A discovery like this has definitely pushed personalization in diet and exercise apps, with unique diet and exercise plans based on an individual users’s unique needs and attributes. Personalized nutrition is big business — and estimates say the market will reach upwards of $11.5 billion by 2025. This isn’t too surprising given that the market for specialty foods aimed at the many emerging “food tribes” (those who exclusively define themselves by following very specific diets, such as paleo, ketogenic, vegan, etc.) has exploded in recent years. Just as one example, gluten-free products were virtually nonexistent a decade ago — but just by 2017 alone, the global market was valued at over $4.7 billion. With consumer desire for customization aligning with promising research, it’s no surprise that companies in several wellness-focused sectors are trending towards a personalized approach. From individualized meal plans and exercise monitoring devices, to supermarket-crafted and shopper-tailored grocery lists, the marketplace is seeing an explosion in personalized health and fitness innovations. Personalized fitness is huge, too, with companies such as Apple and FitBit, among others, leading the way to discover the “quantifiable self” — a term referring to the vast array of numerical health measurements that can be recorded and analyzed from an individual at any given time via wearable technologies. Just like in the diet and nutrition world, no one fitness program or routine fits all. Users want a program that works with their specific goals, their physical abilities or disabilities, their unique schedules, their body types, their interest levels, and so on. Personalized fitness makes that all possible.
It’s very common for people to get tired of interacting with their app due to the generic content and notifications not relevant to them. Who wants to use an app that doesn’t solve their specific problems or that caters to their specific needs? Some may get the terms “customization” and “personalization” confused — but customization and personalization are two different things. Customization is the user having the ability to make changes and to choose what they want in the app. Personalization is much more dynamic and happens in real-time. It’s about tailoring the app experience to meet the needs of a specific user. Personalization is a step beyond customization. Humans want to feel special — we want to feel we are understood and that our needs will be met. That’s why users love personalization — it’s as if everything is tailored just for them. Mobile app personalization can include push notifications, recommendations, suggestions, tips, discounts, special offers, and so on. All of this stuff and more individualized and relevant to the user.
Some Benefits of Personalization:
Raising App Awareness: One of the keys to growing your app is knowing what your users like and dislike. You can find this out by collecting data on user behavior, or even directly conducting a survey on user preferences. After you’ve gotten to know your users, you can use this information to keep them as long as possible and increase overall app usage. The way you’ll enhance your app’s user awareness will depend on your goals and app type. For example, if you want the user to come back to your app, you can send personalized notifications on up to date events they may enjoy, reports, news, and so on. However, these features need to be relevant in order for this strategy to work, as well as useful and not too aggressive. Going over the top could have the opposite effect.
Higher User Retention: With over 5.5 million apps available in the App Store, it’s safe to say that the app market is very crowded. So, why should people use your app over the hundreds of others out there? Add to that the fact that 25% of users abandon apps after just one use. This is where app personalization comes in handy. By creating a personalized app experience for users, you give them more reasons to continue coming back to your app instead of ignoring or forgetting about it. An app that’s tailored to users’ needs and that provides them with relevant offers, discounts, or recommendations increases regular usage. Personalization is also going to make your app stand out from the crowd. According to Evergage, only 28% of all apps are personalized. In a crowded market, that’s a great way to gain an advantage over competitors and improve app retention. Users drop, switch, and abandon if they don’t feel anything significant that encourages them to stay hooked to your app.
Better Customer Experience: Mobile app personalization has a huge impact on overall customer experience. It takes care of the users, makes things more convenient, easier, and faster. In a study by eMarketer, 35% of users say they want more personalization. If you’re wondering how to improve customer experience, you have to listen to what people are saying. In research conducted by Evergage, 84% of businesses report that customer experience is the key driver behind personalization.
More Engagement & Conversions: Even though apps are just pieces of software and not actual human beings, users still don’t want to feel like they’re getting messages from robots. That’s why people love personalization. It provides the illusion of human interaction, which drives engagement. When users are presented with relevant content tailored to them, they’ll engage with it. When a user receives a personalized offer or discount, they’re much more likely to make a purchase. It shows users that you understand and take care of them. When you give people what they want, need, or like, they’ll engage with it. Lack of engagement with your customer is a “suck point,” and it happens when your app is not optimized. The way to fix a high churn rate is to focus on personalization and implement better features that will eventually improve engagement rates for your app.
Increased Brand Loyalty: No matter the kind of business, brand loyalty is crucial. Loyal customers make repeat purchases, recommend you to their peers, and engage often. According to Localytics, loyal customers generate 25% more in-app purchases than other users. When you have a personalized app, brand loyalty goes up. When you cater to the specific needs of a user, they’ll repay you with loyalty. Just remember that 33% of customers abandon a business because personalization is poor or non-existent. So, if you want to keep your customers and make them loyal to your brand, you’ll need to focus on mobile personalization. Aside from an increase in brand loyalty, personalization can also help to bring you higher revenue (loyalty = repeat usage/purchases & personal brand ambassadors).
Keeping Up With & Standing Out From Competition: Hundreds if not thousands of apps are being added to the stores such as Google and iOS on a daily basis. Unique personalization will provide you with a more significant opportunity to promote your app’s value propositions and brand your app more effectively and efficiently.
Gathering Personalized Data & Analytics Is The Crucial 1st Step
What makes an app successful? An awesome user experience. Mobile app personalization is what helps to build this awesome user experience. Personalization is key to an app’s effectiveness and success, and lends focus and beauty to your app design. Effective personalization of your health and fitness app will make it more appealing, beneficial, and sought after. Before you can begin to personalize your app, you’ll need to collect user data. Data collection will help you to understand your users — who they are, what they want, what they need, their preferences, and so on. Once you have a clear understanding of that, you can create a custom experience for them. Many marketers out there may struggle with their campaigns due to lack of personalization. Offering the same push notifications and the same discounts to everyone doesn’t work anymore. You must be more creative with the focus on individual users. Users want a streamlined and personalized experience tailored to their unique needs and interests. To ensure a great app experience, app developers and marketers must learn and understand their users’ in-app actions, profile, and behavioral data. First, you’ll need to discover the in-app patterns of your users. How regularly do they interact with your app? This stage of discovery can also help you learn what works and what doesn’t. Gathering all the necessary information, analytics, and user data can help build your user-oriented app experience. Aside from the journey pattern your users take inside your app, you’ll also want to collect profile data and integrate it with your users’ actions (behavioral data). Profile data combined with other personal data could include user attributes such as age, gender, interests, occupation, location, device(s), likes/dislikes, user/customer type, app activity, conversion history, and so on. This will help give a more complete view of your users and how they interact with your app. In order to analyze and recognize user patterns to (among other things) create groups of similar users, you’ll need an effective and efficient way to collect this data. With the help of such collected data and analytics, you can begin to create a much more personalized journey for your users within the app, while also reinforcing the offers in your app. If you’re able to effectively and efficiently gather user data and analytics, you can make your users feel that their preferences are being considered and taken into account by your brand. With accurate and abundant data, you’ll also be able to provide personalized and well-timed push and in-app notifications, which can additionally ensure uninterrupted and consistent (but not harassing!) communication between you and the app users. Data collected can also be used to help your users use your app better and more easily. Data analytics collected can be used to help developers make their apps more appealing to users, prolonging their sessions. You’ll also be able to see where users get stuck, and can even have messages that ping users when that occurs to guide them through. If you have an in-app community, you can also use data and analytics from community actions to group users further and give them even more personalization. The clear theme here is having an effective and efficient way to collect user data from all sources and provide developers and marketers with advanced analytics so that they may review and analyze the data in a clear manner. Advanced analytics and user data will help marketers and developers understand their users, see patterns, segment users, and make informed decisions for personalizing and improving their apps. That’s where a health and fitness app development platform like Cardian can help make this step a cinch.
Often times, creating user-specific insights requires time-consuming, costly development efforts, and a background in math/statistics. There is no standard format for data, which means that developers must create their own in-house solution. Cardian allows developers to seamlessly join health & fitness data analytics from multiple platforms, sources, and user datasets to drive powerful insights with minimal effort and time investment. As a developer, you’ll have the ability to perform real-time queries using built-in math functions across your entire dataset in order to better understand customer behavior and track app performance. With Cardian analytics, you can expand your health and fitness experience by you can turning user data into insights customers can actually understand and act on — empowering them to take better control of their lives. As well as providing value for your customers, Cardian analytics provide statistics that can help you personalize your offerings with insights on activity habits, sleep patterns, workout preferences, and more. With advanced analytics and simple data collection using Cardian, you’ll be able to more easily and efficiently personalize your app.
Ways to Make App Personalization Work
After collecting information needed for personalization, you can start analyzing and noticing patterns that emerge, allowing you to group your app users based on similarities (segmentation). Segmentation will make the app personalization process a lot easier and will allow you to discover common patterns between your many users. For example, you can determine users who are drawn to certain workouts or diet plans, or maybe categorize users based on how active they are, or even figure out which users came to your app from which channels or devices. The possibilities of segmentation are endless. To reach results, you’ll need to organize and structure your analytics. You can use this data for improving personalization and increasing conversions. With segmentation, you can compare and contrast metrics and deduce which users have a better lifetime value (LTV).
Push notifications: According to Responsys, 68% of users have notifications enabled. The challenge is not getting user to want to interact with their app, but rather sending them relevant and engaging push notifications. If you personalize push notifications based on user demographics and behavior, it will keep things interesting. You can benefit from push notifications in many different ways. As you should remind yourself on every occasion, it’s a good idea to send a personalized push notification without boring users. There are many moments you could send a push notification. One notification type that has proven itself time and again is location-specific notifications, boasting a 40% average click through rate. Location-specific content can be something like letting a user know about a special offer while they’re near a fitness center. Identifying mobile moments such as this allows you understand how to implement location-based marketing into your own marketing strategy. You can ping users with content related to the user’s country or offer a discount on its national holidays. For example, The Home Depot app shows items that are relevant to the country you are in. You can implement location-based marketing to show the weather forecast, traffic situation, travel advice, events, restaurants, as well as to provide special offers by using users’ current locations. Push notifications can be and are used in so many ways. For the purpose of health and fitness, another way they’re used is as reminders. If users haven’t used the app for awhile, you can send them a reminder. Perhaps you’ll even send tips based on their specific needs, interests, plans, routines, and so on. You can also alert users of a new virtual class available that they may be interested in. The possibilities are endless. No matter the type of app you have, you can benefit from sending personalized push notifications. However, it’s important to keep in mind that users should opt-in to receive them, and that it should also be easy for them to opt-out. You don’t want to harass people and push them away.
Personalized marketing campaigns & in-app messages: Unlike push notifications, users can also get in-app messages while using the app. These should also be personalized. A simple way to do so is to address each user by their name — a basic, yet essential feature. You can also notify a user when they complete or reach a milestone related to your app. You can also send recommendations based on their interests, needs, plan, routine, activity, and so on. Research by segment found that 49% of people converted after getting a personalized recommendation. No matter the approach, make sure that in-app messages are tailored to the individual user. Running personalized marketing campaigns also drive customers back to your app by speaking to their interests. The most basic way to go about this is to target similar groups of users who have common attributes or interests. In this way, app message campaigns get more relevant and higher click through rates. This is what is known as a profile related way. Another way to go about personalized in-app messaging is behavioral related. You can trigger an app message as a result of a corresponding event. For example, you can send an in-app message with a special offer if a user completed at least 3 different workouts and tried at least 1 health recipe, etc. This kind of automated campaign is launched when a user completes a pre-defined action or set of actions. It occurs immediately without any action from the marketer themselves. You’ll just need to define those event-based triggers. Lastly, you can combine profile data with behavioral data while creating a personalized campaign. For example, you can target female users coming from Tennessee who didn’t follow their diet plans during the last month. You can offer them some sort of (perhaps Tennessee related) incentive to get them back on track. These kinds of campaigns drive conversion, boost engagement, retain users, increase awareness, and build loyalty.
Respecting the privacy of your users: Studies show that users generally have no issue with giving out data to get more personalization. Salesforce’s study found that 57% of people will trade personal information for personalized offers. Additionally, according to Statista, 48% of consumers say it’s fine if businesses use their purchase or activity history to create personalized offers. But — they want to be able to opt-in and out whenever they want. However, just because people in general are open to you collecting data in exchange for personalization, it doesn’t mean that you should take advantage of that. It’s important to be transparent about the data you’re collecting, and how you’re using it. The same goes for notifications. You shouldn’t go overboard. If the user has enabled push notifications, it doesn’t mean you should spam them 50 times a day. No matter how personalized the notifications, doing this will only push users to delete your app in seconds.
A Real Example of Effective Personalization in Health & Fitness
The fitness app, Nike+ Run Club allows users to choose their workout plans. The workout plan changes and adjusts according to the progress the user makes. Users also get tailored guidance that helps them reach their goals. It’s like carrying a real fitness instructor in your pocket at all times. The app also sends personalized tips about nutrition, health, and mindfulness. Features like these engage users even when they’re not working out.
Interested in getting help creating or maintaining an amazing health and fitness app? You can try Cardian for free today. Contact us through our online messenger or online form to get access to our APIs.
