The Key Ingredients to Make or Break a Mobile App Personalization Team

By now, you are probably well aware that mobile app personalization is the wave of the future. Customers are using mobile apps now more than ever before — to check bank statements, make purchases, access social media, catch Pokémon, and so much more. It’s 2016, and mobile app personalization is even more important this year than it’s been in previous years. Nowadays, most customers expect businesses to provide optimized experiences — every single time. To achieve your mobile app vision, you need to have the right people on your team. What ingredients are crucial to building a high-performing, mobile app personalization team; and how do those ingredients interact with one another to drive results?

Building Your Team
To create personalized, mobile app experiences for your customers, it’s imperative that you have the following invaluable people on your team:

1. A Data Analyst or Expert
First and foremost, you need a data analyst or expert. This person will analyze the data for patterns to determine where the most fertile opportunities for personalization exist. How? By prioritizing segments (or customers) and anticipating what those segments want from your brand.

2. A Marketing Strategist
Next, you’ll need a marketing strategist to help you take action on the insights provided by your data analyst. Marketing strategists ask, “How can I validate and operationalize these insights?” These two people — the marketing strategist and data analyst — are key to helping you determine both what your customers expect with regard to content and how to present that content in a personalized, seamless way.

3. A Solution Architect or Technical Expert
This person is responsible for designing sophisticated solution architecture. Robust. Powerful. A solution architect utilizes all data sources and solutions and applies a strategy to simultaneously meet the needs of both the customers and the business.

4. A Developer, and 5. A Designer
Finally, your team needs both a developer and a designer. The developer focuses on modifying the mobile app itself, while the designer brings the app to life visually.

Learning Some Tips of the Trade
You might already have a sophisticated vision of what you’d like to accomplish in the personalization space — but first things first. Mobile app personalization is a different breed. You need a specialized roadmap that uses strategy and prioritization to drive your program forward.

The first landmark: establishing a comprehensive and actionable view of the customer by ensuring the right infrastructure and process are in place to access your data. When you overlook data, you jeopardize your ability to personalize the experience. Your mobile app personalization team will work best when information is shared across all channels — meaning, you must replace the silo mentality with a more holistic, streamlined approach. To do this, it’s best to delineate how vital data is shared across all channels within your organization. Draft a detailed workflow — from step A through Z. The more data available to your team, the more personalized your customer’s journey will be — from beginning to end.

The next landmark: define customer segments. For example, who engages with your brand via desktop, and who finds your brand on a mobile device? From here, you can identify critical touchpoints and prioritize opportunities for personalization accordingly.

The next stop on your itinerary allows you to address some important quandaries. For instance, how are your customers currently engaging with your brand? Are they responding to infographics, videos, and interactive-presentation vehicles? What do your customers need from you — and what are the best avenues to use to reach out to them in the future? Once these vital questions have been answered, you can begin testing your expectations for validity across those critical segments. If you get the green light, you can finally begin operationalizing and incorporating additional levels of granularity in your content. To really drive business goals, your core elements must be in place, allowing you to present your customer with an unforgettable, personalized, mobile app experience.

Moving Forward
Building a mobile app personalization team boils down to more than simply assembling a team of people or allowing a data-driven mentality to permeate the culture of your business. It’s about creating and implementing a personalization strategy that marries customer and business objectives. Create stellar experiences while you maximize business goals. When these two elements are synchronized, you’re bound to be successful.