Spotify Wrapped: A playlist of Strategies

Hello Hello Hello,

Looks like we made it to the last month of the year. The time when the temperature drops, the days become shorter & when Spotify Wrapped takes over your Instagram account.

Not gonna lie, I might’ve slightly judged people based on their Spotify wrapped & I’m not proud of it

A lot can happen in a year & it sure was nice to reflect on the year as a whole through songs.

Spotify has undoubtedly topped the charts when it comes to personalizing the experience for its users & that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about today!

Let’s decode Spotify’s Personalization Strategy & the reason behind the virality of Spotify Wrapped:

🎙️Why does Spotify Wrapped hit the right notes?

No doubt it is one of the most wildly successful marketing campaigns since its launch. In fact most shareable one too!

But what is so effective about the campaign? How does it effortlessly keep attracting new users & keep them actively looking forward to engaging every year?

Let us narrow down the playlist for you:

1. It is all about You, Me, and The Users … Not the Brand!❌

The whole campaign is focused on the customers, their data, their songs, their playlist, and them. There is no marketing gimmick attached to put the limelight on the platform. And because of this, users feel ownership of whatever result they’ve received. (no gimmick is also a gimmick)

2. The result is Easily Shareable as tiny bite-sized stories!😲

Speaking of sharing, what’s fantastic about Spotify wrapped is that any part of it could be shared in the form of eye-catching & visually appealing cards. But why cards? Well, the internet has a short attention span.

3. ‘Missed Hit’ to keep you going🎧

Spotify is loved for its recommendations. Along with the Wrapped year review, Spotify generates a ‘Missed Hits’ playlist to help users discover songs they might have missed but may love, according to their listening behavior; making its transition into a new journey.

But being a platform having 433 million different users across 183 different markets with a library of over 70 million tracks;

How do you think Spotify makes this happen?

Let’s fine-tune our strategy chords a bit:

🪩How is Spotify acing the game of Personalized Marketing:

There aren’t a lot of compelling examples of Personalized Marketing, however, Spotify does take it to another level.  

So much so that Spotify Wrapped alone is responsible for a 21% surge in app downloads.

The reason behind it is simple: Data & Artificial Intelligence. It all begins with Data at the most fundamental level.

• Spotify collects all sorts of user info - gender and location (thanks to login credentials), their most streamed artist, the hours spent on the app, keywords they search, how a person interacts with the platform & whatnot.
• Being a data-driven company, Spotify uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science to improve its user experience and provides personalized playlists every week.  
• Every day half a trillion events are processed daily on the data models creating 433 million different products—one for each and every user.

P.S. all the strategies can’t be contained in a single newsletter but it was very fascinating, surely.

This is just about Spotify, but brands like Netflix and Kroger also are in the league to set a remarkable example of effective personalized marketing using AI.

What’s stopping you from being on the list?

📚Story of the Week:

Xeno’s AI-Powered CRM is enabling brands like Shopper Stop, Tommy Hilfiger, Colorbar, McDonald’s, etc to build deeper customer understanding and run personalized predictive campaigns.

Check out the customer stories to understand how these brands kick-started their personalization journey with Xeno: Read the success stories here

That’s all for today.

P.S. I’m making a new playlist & would love to know your top song on Spotify Wrapped this year! Let me know by replying to this thread🤗

Till then, hope you have the brightest week ahead.