What Is a Persona?
The basic definition of Persona is the aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or perceived by others. In marketing however, a marketing persona is slightly different. The definition given by Ardath Albee is “Marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. For content marketing purposes, you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience”.
How Many Persona Do You Make?
It is recommended that you make three to five personas to represent your audience. This number is found to be large enough to cover the majority of your customer audience, yet small enough to still carry the value of specificity. There are many templates to easily make a persona. You want to know who the person is, what they value, and how best to speak to them. A quick overview of a persona would go as follows. Have the name of the persona, the job title, demographics, goals and challenges, values/fears, marketing message, and elevator pitch. You will also want to include additional information specific to your customers. This could be things like hobbies, real quotes from interviews with customers, computer literacy, where they get their news, and blogs they read.
How Do You Create A Marketing Persona?
There are many sources of information on your audience, from the small details logged away in your site statistics to actual conversations with real-life customers. So here are the 3 main places to look for information.
- Check Site Analytics: Inside your analytics, you can see where your visitors came from, the keywords they used to find you, and how long they spent once they arrived to the site. This data is very helpful for personas as it can reveal the desires that led your audience to your site as well as what tools they used to get there.
- Involve A Team in Creating Profiles: Assemble a team together. Not only for marketing purposes, but for customer service, growth, development, and much more. This is helpful because the more people interact with customers the more insight you get on what others may think makes the consumer tick.
- Social Media Research: Social Media is another good way to conduct research. it is extremely popular in today’s society and can be helpful with gathering information. Use social media listening to find your potential customers asking questions or airing problems your product can solve on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, Snapchat and Instagram.
How Do We Use This Information About Personas in Email Marketing?
Now that data has been collected on potential customers, we can now start to work on the email marketing. It is well-known that some of the greatest results can be gained by combining personalization and persuasive architecture to deliver what the customer wants. By using the information gathered it is now possible to personalize these emails based on different personas. For example if you send out 3 emails you may use three different personas. By doing this, the types of offers and deals via email, are being personalized towards the experience for them and by combining personas with merchandising personalization they receive an increase in sales.
Bringing It All Together
Marketing personas will help you identify with your audience and better solve their problems. And when you solve their problems, everyone wins. Personas are very helpful in order to reach the intended audience desired. It may seem confusing at first trying to come up with 3-5 different persona, but using templates provided on the internet and the information given in this blog it should become much easier. It is a tool that can be extremely helpful in marketing but does require some research. Be sure to assemble a quality team in order to get the best information and different perspectives on how customers may think. A good way to get direct information is also through interviews and surveys this gets answers straight from the source and how they are thinking. Still like stated above, checking the analytics from your site and using social media are also great ways of gathering information to create solid personas. Hopefully this blog post gave you some useful information on what personas are and how they can be helpful in marketing emails. The results will be a better experience for the customer and a more engaged user for your business.
Citations:
Carter, Joanna, et al. “Using Personas for Email Marketing.” Smart Insights, 5 Nov. 2013, https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/using-personas-email-marketing/.
Lee, Kevan. “The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Marketing Personas: Buffer.” Buffer Marketing Library, Buffer Social Blog, 30 Nov. 2018, https://buffer.com/library/marketing-personas-beginners-guide.
