[📕 Guide] Building a personalized content experience

 

🔖 Be sure to bookmark back to refer these instructions as you’re implementing this guide!

Guide Purpose

Creating a personalized hub experience is a powerful way to engage your members with relevant content, reduce overwhelm, and increase retention. Like Netflix uses personalization to show viewers content based on their preferences, you can use Membership.io to create a customized experience that delivers the right content to the right members at the right time.

The best personalization feels intuitive and helpful rather than restrictive. Members should feel that the Hub is curated specifically for their needs while still having access to all the content they might want to explore. With that in mind, we recommend keeping your personalization simple. Opt for simple questions to help members self-identify where they're at and what they'd like to focus on.

This guide will walk you through each step required to build personalization into your hub, providing links to detailed help articles to support you every step of the way.

➡️ Feel free to click on any link to dive deeper into what's being mentioned.

How to build a personalized hub experience

1. Sort your Hub content using Content Tags and Playlists
2. Create Audience Attributes to allow members to self-identify their preferences
3. Build Segments to connect the right people with the right content
4. Apply Segment visibility to your Hub Sections
5. Review and test your personalized Hub

Part 1 - Sort your Hub content using Content Tags and Playlists

Organize your content into logical categories that your members will identify with.

The foundation of personalization is well-organized content. Before setting up the personalization features, you need to sort your content into clear categories or "buckets" that will be meaningful to your members.

You can organize your content based on different criteria such as:

• Level of difficulty (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
• Topic areas or interests
• Business functions
• Member journey (we call these Success Paths) stages

Content in your Library is organized using two main tools:

1. Content Tags help you categorize content and can be applied across multiple pieces of content. 
2. Playlists group specific content together in a way that can be shared with your audience.

To get started, create one or more Playlists for each personalization track/topic/stage. 

For example: Brock Johnson's InstaClubHub has multiple Playlists per level. In the picture below, you can see how a Playlist has been curated to cover Instagram Basics.

📁 While organizing your content, keep these best practices in mind:

• One piece of content can have multiple Content Tags and appear in multiple Playlists.
• Use Playlists to create granular organization within broader topics.
• Color-code your content categories to provide visual cues to your members. The example pictured above, you can see that a peach tone is used to help identify what content is part of level 1 out of 5. Each level has a specific colour theme that content from that level shares.

📝 This is a great opportunity to audit your content and identify any gaps in your library. You might discover you have plenty of advanced content but are missing beginner resources, or have comprehensive coverage of one topic but limited content on another.

Part 2 - Create Audience Attributes to allow members to self-identify

Ask your members questions that help you understand their preferences and needs.

Audience Attributes are questions your members answer about themselves. These self-identified preferences will determine what content is most relevant to them.

To set up effective attributes:

1. Navigate to the Attributes menu inside your Hub editor or use the Data page in your account.
2. Create a multiple choice Attribute with options that align with your content organization.
3. Add this Attribute to your onboarding page so members can select their preferences when they first join. This information will be stored in their profile and can be updated later if their needs change.

For example, you could create attributes for:

• Experience level ("I'm just getting started," "I know some things," "I have some experience," "I am experienced")
• Content interests ("Marketing," "Sales," "Operations," "Finance")
• Goals or challenges members want to address

Part 3 - Add Segments to connect people with content

Create Audience Segments that will serve as the bridge between member preferences and content.

Segments are groups of people that have something in common. Segments act as the "glue" between your content and your people, determining which content is shown to which members based on their self-identified preferences.

You'll use Segments to control who sees what personalization track inside your Hub. The Attribute(s) you created in Part 2 will act as your Segment conditions. You'll need to create one Segment per multiple choice option.

For each option in your Audience Attribute, create a corresponding segment:

1. Navigate to the Audiences tab your account and open the Filter and Segment menu on the top-right side.
2. Select Personal Details inside the Select Condition dropdown and open the Attributes list.
3. Configure your Segment to include members who selected the first choice.
4. Confirm your selection and save it as a new Segment.
5. Repeat this process for as many choices as you included in your multiple choice Attribute.

Here's how your Segment should look:

Part 4 - Apply Segment visibility to your Hub Sections

Control which content is visible to which Segments of your audience.

Now that you have your content organized and your audience segmented, you can control content visibility:

1. In your Hub editor, create as many Sections as needed for each of your content categories.
2. For each Section, click on the visibility settings (look for the 👁️ icon).
3. Select Audience from the dropdown menu.
4. Choose the Segment that should see this content.

For a more in-depth and visual example of how to apply Segment visibility, check out our article on how to use Segments to control Hub Section visibility.

Part 5 - Review and test your personalized hub

Ensure your personalization works as expected by testing from a member's perspective.

Once you have everything all set up, take the opportunity to test the member experience to make sure it's working as intended.

You can use the Impersonate feature to view your Hub as members to verify that the right content appears for each Segment. Alternatively, you can also add yourself as a member in your Hub to go through the entire onboarding sequence to ensure everything is set up.

And that's it.

Congratulations! 👏 You've successfully built a personalized hub experience. Way to go!