Why a create a persona for email marketing?
Personas are important for various reasons, but most importantly is to to make sure your campaigns are targeting the right buyers or potential customers. You wouldn’t want to send an email about your product or services to a customer that is not part of your consumer profile. This would lead to waste, loss in sales, and a high volume of unsubscribe angry notes to your email marketing administrator. Which could, in turn, impact your brand reputation.
When creating a persona make sure that it aligns with your company’s or brand’s core belief. As an example for adidas, their core belief is “Through sports, we have the power to change lives”. As a sports brand, adidas puts young and old athletes at the center of everything they do. Meaning they will have multiple personas created to target specific products to customers that have a higher chance of conversion or purchasing a product.
By creating specific personas adidas is sure to communicate more effectively to it’s costumers, and resonate better when new products are launched.
What is a Persona?
A persona is a profile that is created for your specific customer base. It should include as much known information of a particular customer type.
This that are mostly included in a Persona are:
- Demographic Data
- Name
- Gender
- Age
- Profession
- Income
- Nationality
- Primary language
- Educational background
- Behavioral Data
- Likes and dislikes
- Brand loyalty
- Hobbies
- Interest
- Marketing Data
- Blogs
- Newsletters
- Market trends updates
- Social media outlets that are used
- Conferences attended
You don’t need to have all the information above filled out, but any piece of data could be helpful, when creating a costumer or buyer person. Below are two examples from a blog created by Kim Kosaka from Alexa.
How to use personas in email marketing campaigns
Now that you understand personas, let’s talk a bit about how to be use them so they can drive sales. Now that you have narrowed your customer pool, let’s start a communication strategy to help them purchase and become loyal customers.
My two top, and most important, must do things are content and offer.
You will have eyes on your emails, let’s make them count. If you are going to invest on anything, invest on a great copy editor. Your content should be crisp, to the point, and worthy of your brand’s image. It has to grab the reader in a few short seconds, so make sure you have a great call to action right off the bat, to draw your potential buyer or customer in. Great content equals great open rates.
The other must do is have an enticing offer. This could be in multiple ways, such as:
- A free trial of your product
- Join a loyalty program
- Receive free shipping on the first order
- Receive XX% off on the first order
- Sign up to a newsletter
- Receive a free article for signing up
- Free tickets to a conference or a meeting
Whatever offer you put out there, make sure it’s relevant and strong to drive a great CTR.
Conclusion
Your customers and buyers time is valuable, as well as your. Minimize the wasted emails you are sending to people that can care less about your product(s). Make sure you identify your target customer and create a persona for as many potential customers. This will help you reach the right people for your brand. Also, make sure you track your email marketing KPIs, to see how accurate you are being. Tweak and change if needed, to bring efficiency to your email marketing campaign. Personas will drive the right customer, to buy the right product, at the right time, for the right price. Keep that in mind and your business will increase 10 fold!
Sources:
Kosaka, Kim. “Here Are 10 Buyer Persona Examples to Help You Create Your Own.” Alexa Blog, 2 Oct. 2019, https://blog.alexa.com/10-buyer-persona-examples-help-create/.
“How To Create Personas For Marketing In 2019.” Digital Agency Network, 20 Mar. 2019, https://digitalagencynetwork.com/how-to-create-personas-for-marketing-in-2019/.
