Whether they’re shopping online or looking for parenting tips, people have grown accustomed to personalized interactions and tailored recommendations that cater to their unique needs and preferences. The same is true for well-being. This week’s blog shares best practices for creating meaningful and relevant experiences to ensure participants are getting the most from your well-being program.
Why is personalization important?
Participants are more likely to interact with a well-being program when they see that it has their best interests in mind. Providing a personalized experience allows you to create and reinforce loyalty in your well-being program—making individuals feel like it’s all about them. Finally, personalization allows you to build relationships with your population through one-to-one interactions that provide unique value to each participant—with just the right tool, intervention or the program as a whole.
What is personalization in well-being?
There are many types and levels of personalization, but here are the key building blocks:
The basic level: Showing that you know the user and leveraging basic profile and biometric data. An example might be addressing an individual by name in an email or sending an article about nutrition to someone with high cholesterol levels.
The next level: Making recommendations using expanded profile data. For example, allowing each participant to choose the topics they’re interested in— eating better, reducing stress, getting more exercise—and then serving up programs, tools and content related to those topics.
The highest level: Refining interactions within a given context, intelligently blending demographic data, user behavior and device or other imported data. In other words, taking personalization to the next level to create a relevant well-being experience—one that gives people what they want as well as information they didn’t know they needed, but are glad to receive. This might look like encouraging an employee who has enrolled in a healthy pregnancy program to check out the Employee Assistance Program for help locating childcare, or directing them to the financial wellness program to get information on budgeting for childcare needs.
How to create a personalized well-being experience
Personalization can be a challenge when it comes to well-being. While we sometimes have good data from a Health Assessment or biometric screenings to prompt our recommendations, most of the information we have about a person comes from data they self-report. And, as we all know, we’re often not the most reliable reporters of our own health habits!
But there are things we can do to create a more personalized well-being experience:
- Ask participants what’s important to them
- Give them choices about how to interact
- Let them build their experience their way
Here’s what we also know about personalization
- Most people need reminders and nudges to keep them on track. And everyone wants to choose how they receive that information—text, email, in-app alert or even a letter in the mail.
- Many people need an actual human being whom they can trust—either a peer or a professional— to act as a personal champion who will hold them accountable and help them stay the course. Health coaches are great resources for this.
- Abstract, long-term goals like “being healthy” aren’t motivating for most people. Most of us want to see shorter-term benefits, like “more energy” or “better sleep” or “my clothes fit better.”
- Personalized insights need to be adjusted as individuals’ needs change. As people progress on their health journey, the well-being program needs to progress with them, providing new and different resources and information.
- Status updates are essential. People need to be able to see their progress and the near-term benefits of their activities and behavior changes.
As we’ve outlined, there are many types of personalization, and some are more sophisticated than others. Your goal should be to deliver as personalized an experience as possible given your organization’s current resources and program. Whether you’re just starting up your well-being program or looking to improve your results through greater personalization, we can help. Contact us at connect@webmd.net.
