#69 - Personalizing Your User's Experience with Sam Rinearson of Bott Radio Network

During his time at Bott Radio Network, the director of marketing Sam Rinearson came to speak at the Digital Ministry Conference in 2022. He taught how to personalize your user's experience in a way to build connection and to increase your number of divine appointments every day.Personalization is defined as “the process of tailoring a message or an experience to each individual which speaks directly to their needs, interests, and concerns.” In today’s day and age, we’ve come to expect personalization. On Netflix, we expect to be told what to watch based on our watch history. All throughout the tech industry, we expect someone else to know what we want. Sam breaks data down into two categories: readily available data and actively collected data. Readily available data collection can only tell you what has already happened such as Google analytics and Mailchimp. Actively collected data is the information you can get from your current users. Sam has had success collecting this type of actively data with surveys and questionnaires. He tends to go straight to analytics, but has learned that sometimes data collection is as simple as going straight to users to ask simple questions.Of the data that you acquire, you have to be able to sort through what’s useful to you and what’s not. It can be helpful to first ask “What do I want to know?” then go and find the data that answers your question, rather than going to the data first without having a clear idea of what you’re looking for. Data tagging is an important aspect of personalization as well. Within the audio world, audio transcription is something that Sam highly recommends people to do if they don’t already do it. It’s useful for categorizing content and for helping people find exactly what they’re looking for. According to Sam, you’re not going to be able to make good connections with users if you don’t have good taggingTo learn more from Sam about the power of personalizing your user’s experiences, listen to this entire episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast.Resources:JournityFinney MediaBott Radio NetworkThis talk on YouTube