At a time when brands are striving to deliver seamless, context-aware user experiences across all channels, personalization is no longer a luxury — it’s an expectation. A staggering 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions from companies, and 76% become frustrated when they don’t receive them. However, despite this overwhelming demand, many brands struggle to deliver a truly personalized experience. In fact, while 85% of companies believe they provide such experiences, only 60% of consumers agree.
So, how do you bridge this gap and deliver the kind of dynamic, 1:1 experiences that users desire — and, more importantly, act on? The answer lies in three somewhat obvious yet still elusive core pillars: messaging, segmentation, and behavioral data. Together, these create the golden ticket to achieving personalization at scale, and when executed correctly, they open the door to lasting loyalty, higher conversions, and elevated customer satisfaction.
Messaging: Speak to the individual
Personalized messaging is more than just auto-filling a customer’s name at the top of an email. It’s about crafting content and messages that resonate with a person’s likes, preferences, and behaviors. Whether it’s through email, app notifications, or even texts, the message should feel contextual, relevant, timely — and, well, personal.
Take the case of Bloom & Wild, a leading flower delivery service. It leveraged personalized messaging to connect with users on a deeper level. By integrating customer data into communications, it was able to send messages that really resonated — such as offering personalized product recommendations or reminding users of their anniversary and birthday. This led to a 2x increase in app conversions, proving that a targeted, individualized approach can go beyond simple transactional messaging.
The key to optimizing personalized messaging is integrating it across your various channels, ensuring that every interaction feels part of a seamless narrative. Whether a user is browsing your site, receiving an email, or interacting via your app, the messaging should feel like a continuation of their journey, not a disconnected, one-off interaction.
Segmentation: Understand your audience
Effective segmentation extends well beyond basic demographics. It’s about grouping customers based on shared behaviors, preferences, and actions — creating distinct profiles that allow you to share more relatable content. As you’d expect, this approach goes hand-in-hand with messaging as you gain deeper insights into your customers, which then results in content tailored to that specific segment or group.
A leading online marketplace operating in 45 countries, OLX, used a segmentation strategy to deliver personalized app install banners tailored to unique sets of mobile web visitors. Its approach included:
- Targeting only users who didn’t already have the app installed
- Serving different banner designs and messaging based on user context
- A/B testing each banner version to see which resonated best
As a result, it saw 75,000+ high-quality app installs in just two months, with a 10× higher conversion rate than standard install campaigns.
When you segment your users, you can deliver content or offers that match their behaviors. For example, if a user browses a category of products but doesn’t buy, you could send them a targeted email offering a discount on those exact same products. Companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from these activities than their slower-to-adopt competitors.
Behavioral data: The backbone of personalization
Now let’s dive into the real linchpin of personalization. Behavioral data provides eye-opening insights into how customers engage with your brand, paving the way to predicting future behaviors and creating experiences that practically anticipate a user’s next move. When analyzed correctly, behavioral data has the potential to turn every individual exchange into a positive, profitable, and relevant customer action.
That’s exactly what happened to MyFitnessPal, a popular health and fitness app that used behavioral data to suggest workout routines and meal plans and even track progress based on a customer’s activity. The app doesn’t just rely on basic data such as age and weight. It delves deeper into how the user interacts with the app, tracking which exercises they prefer, what meals they log most often, and even when they are most active. As a result, the company successfully reduced customer acquisition costs (CACs) by 4% YoY while scaling customer spend 20%.
With data privacy already important to customers and regulatory bodies, integrating behavioral data responsibly is essential. Ensuring transparent communication about how their data is used will help foster long-term trust with your audience. But there’s no doubt behavioral data enables brands to deliver highly relevant, personalized offers and content, increasing the odds of conversion and long-term engagement.
The tech behind seamless personalization
Now that you know the “what” and “why” of personalization, let’s focus on the “how.” To implement personalization most effectively, brands must have the right technology at their disposal. More specifically, look for a platform with these tools that can deliver personalized experiences at scale:
- Deep linking that supports direct, deferred, and universal/app link formats, seamlessly connecting users from emails, ads, web, or QR (quick response) codes directly to the precise content within your app — no matter what device or channel they use.
- Cross‑channel attribution that captures accurate attribution across paid, owned, and earned channels, providing a unified view of every customer journey to help you make reliable, data-driven decisions.
- Advanced analytics and segmentation that support robust cohort analysis and behavior-based segmentation, enabling you to target users based on specific behaviors — like app installs, purchases, or inactivity — and craft campaigns accordingly.
- A/B testing that can be run on banners, deep links, and messaging tailored to different segments for continuous optimization and audience relevance.
When you can leverage these innovative tools (ideally from one platform), you’re well on your way to building seamless, personalized journeys that not only meet but exceed your customers’ expectations.
Get to know your customers on a more personal level
According to an Adobe survey summarized across marketing research outlets, 89% of marketers report that personalized campaigns yield a positive return on investment, with many seeing significant revenue boosts from their targeted efforts. When personalized campaigns are executed across multiple touchpoints, whether through email, push notifications, texts, or in-app messaging, the results are often exponentially beneficial.
But real personalization takes a concerted effort. By focusing on messaging, segmentation, and behavioral data, you can begin to map out a plan that goes beyond surface-level interactions to one that truly resonates with your customers. The good news is there are solutions available now to execute your personalization strategy with confidence. When you can leverage platforms that provide AI-driven solutions, cross-channel messaging, and real-time behavioral data integration, you can deliver the kind of 1:1 experiences that customers crave.
Want to turn these strategies into action? Reach out to learn how Branch’s personalization solutions help you achieve measurable results while still respecting your customers’ privacy.
