When it comes to managing a thriving business, what kind of data is the most important to monitor for success?
You might think about sales data, lead generation data, or even growth and development data.
While it’s true those are all important, some of the most important data for success is actually data about your customer base.
Successful business owners know their customers (and their customer data) like the back of their hands, fully understanding who buys from them, what they buy, and why they buy it.
In other words, successful business owners know and understand their buyer personas.
…but what are buyer personas? Do I need them? How do I create them? Do they matter in email marketing?
Continue reading for the answers to these questions and more, starting with defining what exactly a buyer persona is.
What is a Buyer Persona?
Before you can appreciate the importance of buyer personas, you need to fully understand what they are, and what they can do for you.
Shopify defines a buyer persona as “a semi-fictional representation of a company’s ideal customer,” crafted from real data about your business’s existing (and potential) customers.
Buyer personas help you identify who your ideal customers are, what they want (both personally and from your business), and why they buy… making it easier for you to target them with your marketing endeavors.
What Kind of Businesses Should Have Buyer Personas?
If you’re a business of any kind — whether that’s eCommerce, brick-and-mortar, or even service-based — you can benefit from crafting buyer personas.
Regardless of industry, all types of businesses can benefit from intimately understanding who they serve, why they serve them, and how they can best serve them.
However, depending on what industry you’re in and what you offer, the basis of how you craft your buyer personas will differ.
Considerations When Crafting Buyer Personas
While it’s true that all business owners could benefit from a buyer persona, there is no one-size-fits-all list of considerations and data that go into developing these customer identities.
For example, non-profits who are looking to upgrade their donation system might look to donation-related data for their buyer personas, from donation history and modality to preferred causes and dollar amounts.
Service providers — like a photographer, for example — will have totally different considerations from non-profits. Photographers might prioritize data on family structure and location, from the presence/absence of children to the places people frequent for photos.
Then, when it comes to eCommerce businesses, there are different considerations altogether.
Unlike a non-profit, eCommerce businesses won’t typically want information about donation history, and, depending on the product they sell, they might not care about family structure like a photographer would, either.
They may, however, want information about demographics, brand appeal, and pain points or objections, giving them a unique eCommerce-focused point of view from which to craft buyer personas.
Steps to Creating an eCommerce Buyer Persona
So, with that information in mind, how do you create an eCommerce Buyer Persona? There are 5 customizable steps you can take to start developing your brand’s buyer personas.
Step 1: Conduct Demographic & Market Research
The first step to creating your buyer personas is understanding who buys your products.
Mapping out your target market — and their associated demographics — is key for buyer persona development; how can you best serve your audience if you don’t know who they are?
There are different demographics you can consider at this stage, including (but not limited to):
■ Age
■ Gender
■ Family Structure
■ Education/Degrees
■ Geographic Location
■ Financial Status/Income
Knowing the nitty-gritty details of who makes up your audience is a key first step to building your buyer personas because these are some of the details that you’ll use in your classification.
Step 2: Determine Your “Why”
Now that you know who makes up your audience, you need to understand why your business is attractive to these specific people.
You can lean on existing data about your site and/or storefront traffic as well as existing customer feedback. Alternatively, you can create a new survey to find out why people are choosing your company, asking questions like:
■ How did you hear about us?
■ Were you familiar with us already?
■ Have you ever shopped with us before?
■ What made you decide to purchase from us?
■ What stood out to you about our purchasing experience?
Basing your personas on real customer feedback ensures accuracy and reliability when it comes to your audience. Understanding why people have chosen (or continue to choose) your company over others is key to developing identities that are truly reflective of your customers.
Step 3: Determine Use Case
After working to understand why people choose your brand in general, you need to get more specific about why and how people are using your products.
There are many ways to find out your customer’s motivations for using your products. You can:
■ Research competitor use cases,
■ Automate a post-purchase questionnaire,
■ Encourage (and monitor) UGC on social media, or
■ Solicit customer feedback, testimonials, and/or reviews.
Gathering this type of information is useful for buyer personas (and beyond) as it offers insight into things you’re doing right, things you can improve on, and even why people might be choosing your competitor’s brands over yours.
Step 4: Determine Customer Objections
The next step after finding out why people use your products is finding out why people aren’t using your products. Exploring common customer objections, concerns, and pain points can help create a “negative” customer persona; what the person who doesn’t buy from you looks like.
Some common customer objections that you might come across include:
■ Price,
■ Timing,
■ Returns (Ease/Speed),
■ Trust (or Lack Thereof),
■ Shipping (Prices/Speed), or
■ Perception of Product “Usefulness.”
Exploring your customers’ objections and pain points can help you improve your positive buyer personas (i.e. What about them makes these objections obsolete?) as well as create a negative buyer persona (i.e.Why are these objections a big deal to this type of customer?), both of which are incredibly helpful for your brand.
Step 5: Put It Together & Craft Your Personas
After you’ve gone through research, feedback, and self-reflection on your brand and offerings, it’s time to put everything together.
Below is an extremely simplified example of how Steps 1 through 4 can come together into a highly detailed buyer persona.
Step 1: Demographic Results → Our typical customer demographic is male, 20-30 years old, single, highly educated, and making 6-figures in the tech industry.
Step 2: The “Why” Results → Our typical customer prefers our brand over others because our interface allows quick, straightforward, “to the point” purchases that can be made easily at any point within his extremely busy schedule.
Step 3: The Use Case → Our typical customer chooses Product A because it helps him stay organized at his job which leads to success.
Step 4: The Pain Points → Our typical customer doesn’t see many pain points. His salary allows him to afford any of our products without much concern, and he has never had a problem with our interface, shipping, or returns processes.
With all of that information in mind, this buyer persona might be called “Tech Savvy Tom.” He is a wealthy, tech-smart individual who leans on our brand to streamline his day-to-day processes. He doesn’t care about price points as long as our product can get the job done.
Why is Buyer Persona Important in Email Marketing?
Now, how does all of this tie into email marketing?
It’s simple!
Buyer personas can help you customize and personalize your email campaigns for stronger conversion rates in the same way that they help with product development and sales tactics.
There’s no contesting that highly personalized emails are the way to go if you want success from your email campaigns — according to Bluecore, personalized emails offer a 139% increase in click rate versus generic, one-time emails.
Knowing who your customers are, why they chose you, and the motivation for their purchasing is key to putting together an email marketing strategy that drives traffic, growth, and results.
Wrap Up
A buyer persona is one of the most effective ways for eCommerce businesses to leverage their customer data. Not only do buyer personas offer valuable insights into who your customers are and why they buy, but they can help you focus your marketing efforts for maximum success.