First, I should start by describing what exactly a persona is and why they are so important. A persona is a fictional character that designers and marketer create in order to represent their target market or a possible market segment their company wants to break into. Personas can be literally anyone, including age, gender, ethnicity. etc. The more specific you make a persona the more useful it usually is to your marketing. The overall goal of a persona is to understand your user better and to step into their shoes. You want to get a better idea of their experiences, thoughts, likes, dislikes, and wants from a product or service. A persona is used to make the designers job easier and make the task of designing or redesigning a lot less complicated in order to create the best experience for the end user. Personas aren’t just a single person that you decide to create a persona of but a combination of multiple people’s data mashed together to create the most ideal representation of your target market. Now I’ll give you some tips on how to create a great persona for an email marketing campaign.
Create a marketing strategy beforehand for your email campaign
Your persona will only be as strong as the data you collected and goals you create before you start making your persona. Map out the goals you want to achieve with your email campaign. This can anything from building brand awareness, increasing conversions on your website, or promoting deals and/or new products. Once you figure out your end goal you can easily create a campaign around your goals. Then after you have done all this you can build upon it even more by taking all the information you have gathered creating the perfect persona for your marketing strategy. If you nail the persona on the head then you should have a pretty successful marketing campaign.
Create customized email lists
You should think carefully about who you send emails out to and what kind of content you put in those emails. Studies show that carefully planned out emails targeted at specific people have a much higher chance of being successful and increasing conversion rates. Obviously, you want as many people as possible signed up for your emails in order to maximize conversions but you also want to try and personalize your lists so customers are only getting things they want. I think we all suffer a bit from email fatigue where you get so much emails every day from different companies sending you deals and promotions. After a bit it all starts to feel like spam and as a customer you just stop reading them all. You want to avoid this email fatigue as much as possible so your emails don’t get buried or ignored.
Keep it simple but interesting
You know all the great things about your product or service and you want to make sure your customers do to. You don’t want to give them an information overload though. Keep your emails short and simple, and to the point. You need a hook that will grab and hold your audience’s attention, something that will draw them in and keep them reading. Don’t give them a lengthy description of whatever product or service it is you are trying to sell. When people see a long paragraph, they will immediately become uninterested. Instead just focus on highlighting the key points of your product or service. You can use your personas to figure out what you want to focus on. If your audience is really interested, they will do the digging they need on their own.
Have a call to action
If you have a good and accurate persona you should know exactly what your potential customers are looking for. You need to create a call to action that is enticing for your consumers to increase conversion rates. This could be a sale on a category of goods, a free trial/or first month free, or an extra discount for a first-time purchase. You should also think about the type of medium you are using to communicate with your target audience and the wording you use. Most younger tech savvy people are probably fine with just an email or maybe even a text. Older generations might prefer to talk to someone on the phone though. Just keep in mind your target audience is and who your persona is created around.
Use a relevant landing page
The entire point of your email campaign in to increase conversions, and hopefully this task is made a bit easier with the use of personas. You generally don’t want to lead the customers back to your homepage. Depending on what you were focusing on in your emails you want the landing page from your emails to be relevant and engaging. Say you made a campaign for a makeup store promoting all brushes on their site are 20% off for first time buyers, you want your landing page to take you directly to all the brushes on the site because this what they were promised in the email. You promote a specific product or deal this is most likely what the customer will be looking for when they click on your site. You should be able to predict what your target customers are looking for and what they want most based off of the data you collected and the personas you made from said data.
Sources:
- “5 Ways to Create Super-Effective Emails with Buyer Personas.” WordStream, 13 Dec. 2018, www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/01/31/email-marketing-with-buyer-personas.
- Dam, Rikke, and Teo Siang. “Personas – A Simple Introduction.” The Interaction Design Foundation, 1 Nov. 2019, www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them.
- “Digital Marketing Essentials” Larson and Draper, May 2019
