It’s estimated that over 90% of the world’s data has been created in just the past two years – and the rate is only accelerating. As of 2025, we’re generating roughly 328.77 million terabytes of data every single day. Thanks to the rise of AI tools, social media, IoT sensors, mobile devices, financial transactions, and real-time streaming, the internet is producing mind-boggling volumes of data 24/7, with no signs of slowing down.
It’s hardly surprising that it’s making more and more sense to be served tailored information, products and social content that we’re actually interested in, as we don’t have time to curate the vast amount of data or browse endlessly for products by ourselves.
At Webcredible, we’re seeing a more customised experience online as standard, and most of our projects contain some element of personalisation nowadays. Indeed, the ‘single customer view’ is a part of every digital strategy I’ve been involved with over the past couple of years. I believe this will amplify sharply in the next few years and beyond.
Consumer willingness
In some recent customer research we conducted for two well known UK brands, I was not surprised at how receptive the consumers we interviewed were to the concept of receiving tailored content online – but what did surprise me was how comfortable they were with the idea of giving away their data, preferences and behavior in return for it.
Some participants were still adamant they want to guard their privacy online and hide as much as they can from prying eyes, but when questioned more closely, a few admitted that they would like to see information or offers relevant to them.
Interestingly, they often caveat that they’ve already experienced attempts at this that fell short of true relevancy. For example, we’ve all seen online ads for stuff we just bought yesterday.
Clearly there’s a level of sophistication missing in many attempts at marketing and it’s easy to see how it might be hard to plot behaviour patterns for customers without some seriously intelligent algorithms and then some.
New user expectations
However, big data is here to stay, it’s our ability to collect and interpret it now that is the challenge. Privacy and security ethics must also be an significant factor to consider, the Silicon Valley giants have a stranglehold on us and we’re addicted to their products – Google, Facebook, YouTube and so on, which I believe inures us to other organisations collecting data on us more covertly. That doesn’t make what they do right, however I won’t go into that particular debate here.
Younger consumers and those in developing economies care much less about privacy than those who are older and in Western countries: “almost two thirds of consumers aged between 18 and 34 ‘don’t care about privacy’ “(UK Research by Coleman Parkes)
“The creepy factor of brands knowing too much about me is gone. Now we say, ‘Why doesn’t this company know more about me? Why are they sending me irrelevant offers? Why can’t they service me better?'”
– Jim Davidson, President of Farelogix
Suffice to say, within a legal framework, all businesses must address this user expectation. In order to do this we must win customers’ trust and tell them how they will benefit from this transaction of personal data.
In this way we can move towards ensuring that we provide the right content, in the right format and at the right time, which will allow us to keep our customers happy and stay relevant in the market.
Remind me again – what is personalisation?
Personalisation is all about providing users with tailored content, functionality and communications, dependent on any number of factors that differentiate them from other users.
There are many possible sources of data. Some of this data is provided by the user, and some is collected by the system:
- Profile data – what users have told you about themselves
- Search data – what users have looked for
- Transactional data – what users have bought
- Omni-channel data from other touchpoints – email, phone, social media, in-store etc.
- Contextual data – what situation users are in (device, location, time)
- Social data – what users like and what their friends like
These are then interpreted via certain predefined parameters such as customer segments, demographic data and business rules on what to serve to whom.
Recent example
I recently worked with a well-known UK company on personalisation plans for their website and app. Through our research, we developed a solid understanding of user needs and behaviours and built use-cases in order to prioritise the products we know particular audiences are more likely to be interested in. We also determined parameters around those products that we can use as defaults to save time checking out.
What’s a use-case? For example, take a weather app, you can choose to show today’s weather or tomorrow’s as a default. Studying the most popular use cases allows us to provide the information that most people are likely to need.
When we do this we are taking a calculated risk and making assumptions that could be incorrect, so it’s necessary to allow users to amend the site options if they want to and also allow those settings to be remembered for them.
Personalised content
One of the company’s objectives was to grow their international audience. With that in mind, we took the step to detect users’ country to default to their local language.
We will also use imagery that fits the expectations of that market. From our research we also know the types of products that international customers favour, so we can promote those from popular entrance pages and increase the visibility of relevant offers.
Personalised functionality
Further on into our research, we could see that customers could be split into two main groups: frequent buyers and occasional buyers. Differences in online purchasing behavior between the two allowed us to personalise some of the functions to optimise them for the prevalent use-cases for each group.
Because we had detailed data on the purchase patterns and expectations of frequent buyers, we designed functionality to allow them to take ‘shortcuts’ through the product-selection and purchase process. Small additional changes like setting default values and pre-filling forms (e.g. when users had already provided information) further optimised the experience.
We also know that the device being used has a bearing on user needs, so we adjusted defaults and pre-sets to change, depending on whether the user is on mobile, tablet or laptop.
Tailored communications
Communications tend to present a big challenge when it comes to personalisation. While marketers might be delighted at all the channels available to reach out to customers – with the ability to send emails, SMS messages and push notifications to users’ devices – there is a real risk of devaluing communications and therefore the business brand, if customers are swamped with speculative spam.
In our research, many participants said they welcomed marketing messages with offers and discounts, but they caveated this by saying that timing was important and that these communications must be relevant to them.
For me it seems like a no-brainer to allow account holders to select what types of offers they are interested in hearing about. This can be set in account settings and there are ways of prompting users to select these proactively – rather than passively waiting for them to navigate to the right page and act.
Ongoing monitoring of performance through analytics, regular usability testing and design optimisation all allow fine tuning of these initiatives to maximise the chances of achieving business objectives.
In this way, the benefits we see from personalisation won’t only be increased sales for the business – but customers will also realise value in time savings, relevancy and convenience and we can increase satisfaction and loyalty for the future.
Last modified: July 12, 2025