Leveraging Feature Flags for User Personalization

Companies offer different products and services that suit different customers for various use cases. Every product has its own user base scope. Application users and customers come from different demographics and geographic regions. Product acceptability is also highly influenced by seasonality.

Feature flags serve a good purpose in scheduling and toggling features but they also have a business-oriented essence. They help you bring your new features to the right users that convert into paying clients.

In this article, you will learn how to use Unleash feature flags for selective user management. In addition, you will learn the personalization solutions that Unleash offers and how to set them up.

Why Is User Personalization Important?

User personalization is a process of creating and distributing application features and content that is meant to be consumed by a specific demographic or a group of people with common interests. Your features and services are irrelevant to users who have no problems that your features solve. It’s good that an application has more than 50,000 users. But the question is, how many of those users can actually be converted into buying customers? In this section, you will learn how targeting the right customers using Unleash feature flags hones your conversion rates. User personalization is crucial in today’s competitive digital landscape as it allows businesses to:

Improve Conversion Rates and Boost Sales

Personalized feature deployments simplify and shorten the process of converting customers into paying customers. This is because personalized features are delivered to users who already have an interest in your product and know how it works. You don’t have to trigger interest or start with an awareness campaign. Thus shortening the times it takes for a user to be aware of your product to purchase the product. That journey is called a sales funnel. Here are the parts of the sales funnel:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Consideration
4. Intent
5. Evaluation
6. Purchase

Three stages will be skipped: awareness, interest, and evaluation when you deploy features to specific users using feature flags thus improving the sales process. Unleash feature flags can target users with specific promotions or product features based on their behavior and preferences, thereby improving the likelihood of conversion.

Distribute Relevant Features to Users

Epsilon, a retail media company conducted research that showed that 80% of customers are willing to buy a product that has personalized preferences. Amazon’s product recommendation engine is a prime example of effective personalization. By analyzing user behavior and purchase history, Amazon tailors its homepage and product suggestions for each user. This strategy has been so successful that 35% of Amazon’s revenue comes from its recommendation engine.

If you are deploying an e-commerce platform focused on selling women’s clothing, it’s essential to consider the target age group and set the gender to female. Additionally, research regions with a high likelihood of purchasing your products. For instance, deploy a catalog featuring women’s winter clothing in countries or regions that experience long and harsh winter conditions.

Increase Engagement and Retention Rates

Users keep applications that add value to their lives. Users are happy to recommend a product that solves their problems smoothly. The best salespeople you could ever hire are happy customers who share a word about your product. Personalized features don’t generalize solutions, they focus on eliminating the specific problems and work in a way that is suitable for the user.

Implementing Feature Flags for User Personalization

In this section, you will learn all the steps needed to configure feature flags for personalization solutions.

1. Choose a Feature Flag Management System

The first step towards implementing feature flags capable of configuring user personalization is choosing the right feature flag system. A system that gives all the necessary tools and features to personalize your feature deployment. Unleash feature flag management platform is best because it offers:

• Gradual feature rollouts
• User preference management
• Context-aware functionality
• A/B testing and optimization

The above solutions allow you to calibrate your user targeting strategy by allowing you to select users using location and the user’s usage pattern. A/B testing enables you to test and know which user segments or personalization criteria work well.

2. Create a Feature Flag Strategy

A feature flag strategy specifies how the features will be distributed to the users. In this phase, you have to choose the best-suited deployment strategy. The only applicable deployment strategies are the canary deployment and dark deployment strategy. They work well because they deploy new features using user segments before rolling out to the entire user base. Other deployment strategies such as Blue/Green deployment strategy don’t offer personalization concepts such as targeting users based on the data collected from cookies.

The feature flag strategy specifies the age of the feature flag and when it will expire. The type or feature flag, will it be a switch toggle or permission-based feature flag. Also, how the feature will be rolled out, gradually or rapidly. The feature flag strategy tries to configure and create a feature flag that is best suited for the feature’s personalization.

3. Define Personalization Criteria and User Segments

The personalization criteria is the core of the user personalization process. There are many components you can specify or adjust to improve feature user personalization. Here are some of the details you can add to your personalization criteria:

• User Preferences: Preferences is what users want their application to look like and how the contents of the application are presented. Examples of preferences are language and dark mode. Language preferences ensure that content is accessible to different regions that use different locales. Preferences such as dark mode help you to know whether more of your users are trying to reduce eye strain. This information is crucial when rolling out features that have bright and colorful animations.
• Location: By knowing a user’s location, you can provide region-specific trendy content and relevant promotions. This data can also help in distributing applications that comply with local laws and regulations.
• Usage Patterns: The time spent using a single feature says a lot about whether the user likes the feature or not. Usage patterns such as usage frequency and engagement are crucial data in indicating whether the user would be willing to upgrade to a premium tier. The more they frequently use your application they will highly be in a good position to buy your online products.
• Subscription type: Usually products have three tiers: freemium, premium, and Pro or Enterprise. If you want users to buy the premium features, then you have to target freemium users who can upgrade to premium or Pro tiers.

After collecting information using the above factors you can create user segments based on the following:

• User Profile Information
• Subscription Details
• Behavioral Data

The above segments can be added on the Unleash platform UI when creating a user segment or you can add the constraints section in the API request. The constraints below specify the countries for a feature flag that targets the South America region:

"constraints": [
 {
 "contextName": "Country",
 "operator": "IN",
 "values": [
 "Argentina",
 "Brazil",
 "Bolivia"
 ],
 "caseInsensitive": true,
 "inverted": false
 }
 ]

4. Monitor and Analyze Data

Rolling out the second version of a feature will bring better conversion and customer retention rates. It is important to analyze the data of how the first version performed in terms of user conversions, what went wrong, and how to fix it. Sometimes the market is not ready for the new feature and this can be seen by checking how many people used the feature.

You can also find out that a certain user age loves your features more than other user ages. Also, you might need to shorten your geographic range to where most of the users who used the first version live. To get better conversion rates you have to keep on making data-driven decisions and adjusting your personalization strategy and features to become more suitable for the right users.

Conclusion

Building a great application isn’t enough to set customer conversion rates at an exponential rate. A great deployment strategy that carries selective personalization criteria that target good customers is the key to exponential conversion rates. Feature flags are the ultimate partner when it comes to deploying features to user segments.

Mastering the use of feature flags with Unleash equips you with powerful tools to drive business success through strategic feature deployment and personalized user experiences. The Unleash platform has a lot to offer when it comes to specific feature deployment strategy. You can start personalization now and learn more about the endless personalization features unleash has to offer here.