Personalization

Personalization has become one of the most transformative forces in modern business and technology. It’s about creating experiences that feel uniquely tailored to individuals—like when Netflix suggests a show you’ll love, Amazon recommends products you didn’t know you needed, or Spotify crafts a playlist that just gets you.

But personalization isn’t just about algorithms and recommendations; it’s a philosophy that reshapes how brands connect with people, how products adapt to user needs, and how technology evolves to mirror human individuality.

Let’s break down what personalization truly means, why it matters, and how it’s reshaping the way we communicate with brands.

What is personalization?

Personalization is the process of delivering a unique digital experience for each individual user by leveraging customer data and real-time behavior analysis.

Unlike customization, where users actively modify their experience (like designing custom sneakers), personalization is proactive: businesses predict and adapt to user needs without requiring direct input. Think of it as a digital concierge that anticipates your next move.

For example, when you visit an ecommerce site and see “Recommended for You” products, that’s personalization in action. The site analyzes your browsing history, past purchases, and even mouse movements to curate items you’re likely to buy. Similarly, email campaigns that address you by name and reference your last purchase aren’t just polite—they’re engineered to boost engagement by making interactions feel one-on-one.

Some other examples of personalization include:

Product recommendations: Customers are shown relevant products on an ecommerce site based on similar customer behavior and purchase history
Content recommendations: Websites surface related and relevant content to users on web sites and mobile apps based on content they’ve interacted with.
Omnichannel consistency: Successful personalization will yield symmetric experiences and messaging across all devices, social media channels, and any other touchpoints.
Personalized marketing: Brands will use data that has either been collected or analyzed in real time to create a dynamic experience unique to the individual user. Instead of targeting an activity to a broad demographic, it is instead tailored to what is known about each specific individual user. Immediate surfacing of relevant content to web/app visitors increases user engagement, leading to less drop-off.

Overall, it lifts all performance metrics through higher conversions, clicks, and lower drop-offs.

Why is personalization important?

Today’s consumers expect brands to know them.

In fact, over 75% of consumers are more likely to consider buying products from brands that deliver a personalized experience. In that same survey, respondents noted that not only do they expect a personalized experience, they become frustrated when they don’t get one.

Generic blasts (“Dear Customer”) feel outdated and impersonal, often landing in spam folders. In contrast, personalized emails see 26% higher open rates and drive 6x more transaction revenue.

This shift isn’t just about convenience; it’s about trust. When a brand demonstrates it understands a customer’s needs (e.g., suggesting a replacement for a frequently purchased item), it builds loyalty.

Looking at lessons learned from 127,000 experiments, personalization generates a 41% higher impact compared to general experiences.

Instead of targeting an activity to a broad demographic, personalization instead caters to what is known about each specific individual user. Immediate surfacing of relevant content to web/app visitors increases user engagement, leading to less drop-off.

According to Gartner Research, organizations using personalized messaging see 16% more impact on commercial outcomes.

Here are more reasons why personalization matters:

Customers expect it

In today’s world, personalization is a norm, not an exception. In fact, over 75% of consumers are more likely to consider buying products from brands that deliver a personalized experience. In that same survey, respondents noted that not only do they expect a personalized experience, they become frustrated when they don’t get one.

Consider your individual needs as a consumer. When you log into Amazon, you probably expect to see relevant product recommendations based on what you already purchased or what people similar to you purchased. When you log into Netflix, you see a list of recommended movies and TV shows. When you open your email, you see pitches tailored to your specific needs.

These are all personalized experiences that make your shopping or viewing that much easier. According to a RedPoint Global survey, 63% of consumers say that personalization is the standard of service today.

If you don’t offer a personalized experience, customers will shift their loyalty to a competitor that does. Improved understanding of the customer leads to proper segmentation, yielding better personalization and subsequently higher customer satisfaction.
It provides a better customer experience

Personalization immerses the customers in an experience and makes them feel more comfortable with what is being offered. Surfacing the right content to customers results in improved customer satisfaction. That drives customer engagement, conversions and sales, and long-term customer loyalty.

Customers don’t want an experience that feels generic. They want retailers and ecommerce websites to provide them with an experience tailored to their personal needs. They want to feel as if they have your sole attention, not as if they’re just part of a mass mailing or visiting some website designed from a standard template. The more special you can make your customers feel, the more likely they’ll buy from you today and in the future.
Your competitors offer it

If you want customers to purchase what you offer, you must offer a customer journey that surpasses what they get elsewhere. And, don’t deceive yourself – your competitors are working hard to provide personalized experiences of their own.

An Accenture survey found that almost half (48%) of all consumers have abandoned a company’s website and made a purchase elsewhere because they had a poor experience on the site. What you offer, in terms of both product and marketing, must meet or exceed that offered by your competition.

The better you can personalize the customer experience, the more likely it is that you’ll attract and retain the customers you target.
It’s good for business

Personalization leads to better business outcomes, from customer retention to improved conversion rates. Focusing on the customers’ needs and experiences is smart marketing and will put you ahead of competitors offering a more generic experience.

The reality is that customers are more likely to purchase from companies that they know and trust. You can establish that relationship by leveraging what you know about your customers and using that to provide uniquely personalized experiences.

For example, right now, marketing campaigns are focused on email marketing and building email lists where readers feel part of the community. This way they’re likely to buy from someone’s personalized emails whose content they regularly read on their email.

Every digital experience should focus on taking a visitor to the buying moment.

What are the different types of personalization?

Website personalization

Website personalization is the process of creating customized experiences for visitors to a website. Rather than providing a single, broad experience, website personalization allows companies to present visitors with unique experiences tailored to their needs and desires.

It involves tailoring various elements of a website, such as content, images, recommendations, and user interface, to align with the characteristics and behaviors of individual users. This approach aims to enhance user engagement, increase conversion rates, and foster deeper customer loyalty by making the website feel more relevant and personalized to each visitor.

Some of the key aspects of website personalization include:

Data Collection: Personalization relies on collecting and analyzing user data, including browsing history, geolocation, demographics, and past purchases.
Customization: It involves adapting website elements like headlines, product recommendations, and calls to action to match individual user profiles.
Dynamic Content: Websites can dynamically change content in real-time based on user behavior, using technologies like AI and machine learning.
Benefits: Personalization leads to increased sales, improved user experience, and higher customer retention rates.

App personalization

App personalization is the process of building a mobile app to meet the needs of specific audiences. Similar to other forms of personalization, app personalization aims to present user experiences that are customized to their specific needs rather than a broad, one size fit alls experience for all users.

It involves using customer data such as demographics, location, interests, and behavioral patterns to create a customized experience for each user, rather than providing a generic, one-size-fits-all approach.

Some key aspects of app personalization include:

Customized content: Delivering relevant information, recommendations, and offers based on user preferences and history.
Adaptive interfaces: Modifying the app's layout and navigation to suit individual user habits.
Targeted messaging: Sending personalized push notifications and in-app communications.
Dynamic features: Adjusting app functionality based on user behavior and needs.

Hyper personalization

Hyper personalization is an advanced marketing strategy that uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and real-time data to create highly tailored experiences for individual customers. It goes beyond traditional personalization by treating customers as unique individuals with distinct preferences, rather than relying on broad customer segments.

Some key aspects of hyper personalization include:

Data utilization: It leverages a wide range of data sources, including customer behavior, preferences, demographics, and contextual information like location and device usage7.
AI and ML implementation: Advanced algorithms analyze vast datasets to predict customer preferences and deliver personalized content dynamically.
Real-time adaptation: Hyper-personalization systems can quickly adjust to changes in customer behavior, providing up-to-date and relevant experiences.
Omnichannel approach: Personalized experiences are delivered across multiple touchpoints, including websites, mobile apps, emails, and ads.
Granular customization: It aims to create a "segment-of-one" approach, tailoring content, product recommendations, and messaging to each individual customer.

Rule-based personalization

Rule-based personalization works by customizing user experiences with predefined rules to display specific content or features based on user demographics, actions, and behaviors.

You can almost think of this type of personalization as a flow chart, relying on “if/then” logic (e.g. if a user performs action x, show them content y). Each of the touch points that are defined by predetermined rules are like the atoms mentioned above. These atoms might include the user's location, their age, or other affinities. Once these data points or atoms are plotted, the sequencing that occurs thereafter is what forms the molecules.

Some examples of rule-based personalization are:

Dynamic content: Websites adapt to user actions to surface relevant messaging and content. This could take the form of content recommendations or adapting customized messaging to returning users.
Dynamic alerts: Popups and banners show up on user behaviors with tailored messaging. A classic example of a dynamic alert is when a user goes to close a browser window and popup shows up encouraging the user to stay on site.
Dynamic layout: Pages are restructured to surface relevant content based on behaviors taken by the user during navigation. Google does this with SERPs if you are searching from a logged in account.

AI personalization

Modern personalization relies heavily on AI to process massive datasets in real time. Machine learning models analyze millions of interactions to predict what a user wants next. Streaming services like Netflix use collaborative filtering—comparing your habits to similar users—to suggest content.

Here's how you can incorporate AI into your personalization program by taking the right steps:

Start slow. Start small: Gradually introduce tailored content based on your customer's actions to avoid overwhelming them with too much at once.
Test everything: Continuously test AI-enhanced personalization strategies and collect feedback, then make adjustments based on how your customers respond.
Add a human touch: While the recommendations may be algorithmically generated, ensuring that there's a human factor in interactions can make the experience more personal.

At Optimizely, we help brands take this journey through marketing automation. Alaska Airlines registered an 18% increase in loyalty program signups using Stats Accelerator.

Building your personalization strategy

In marketing and product experimentation , personalization is a strategy for offering highly individual experiences based on each consumer’s known characteristics. It involves analyzing consumer behavior and then using this information to design made-to-order experiences that more fully engage the customer.

There are four essential pillars of building your personalization strategy

personalization pillars Source: Optimizely

Planning: Personalization requires careful coordination between multiple different departments across an organization. Before doing anything, you’ll need to ensure you have a shared workspace that allows for collaboration and effective communication between teams.
Creating: Once you have your planning strategy in place, you can incorporate your data infrastructure and customer profiles to guide the personalization workflow process. From behind the scenes, you can use different techniques to create personalized experiences from individual customer data. You can leverage either rule-based personalization or AI personalization (more on those below).
Delivering: This is what is actually surfaced and brought to the customers. This could be product and content recommendations, banners, pop-ups, deals, adjusted pricing, custom user experiences, localization, or any other type of variable that is relevant to business outcomes.
Analyzing: Measuring the success of your personalization requires an integrated data platform and a system for testing, experimenting, and iteration.

Each of these pillars represents an important step in the process of personalization. Each pillar builds on the previous activity and leads to the next stage, culminating in the dynamic content that creates a personalized consumer experience.

What are the challenges of personalization?

When Optimizely conducted a survey of top executives in the marketing industry worldwide, here’s where the respondents noted the biggest challenge areas were when it came to ramping up their personalization efforts:

44% say complicated or fragmented data is a top challenge
43% say a lack of effective analytics holds them up
40% say they have difficulty scaling their program
39% say they struggle to implement the program in real time
36% say disjointed workflows are holding them back

When companies decide to invest in personalization, they need to ensure they have a solid personalization strategy in place. Here some of the most common challenges

Defining personalization: In the aforementioned Optimizely study only 26% of marketing, ecommerce, and IT executives executives reported having a unified definition of personalization throughout their organization.
Scale In order to provide a personalized experience that leverages content and product recommendations, you need a large library of content and inventory of products to pull from.
Data privacy and management: Users are more wary than ever of brands exploiting their data for nefarious reasons. Although 78% of consumers cite they are likely to engage with a personalized offer tailored to their interests, 77% of consumers also cited that data privacy policies are important to maintaining brand loyalty.

Ready to offer your customers a personalized experience

To grow your business, you need to offer a truly compelling personalized customer experience.

Optimizely One builds on real-time user data and insights to provide personalized content, campaigns, products, and website layouts. You can take the guesswork out of personalization for your customer base and provide lifetime value for different customer segments.

To make it easier for you, we have Opal. The AI assistant is there for you through every step of the personalization lifecycle.