Personalization has become one of the main keys of any email marketing strategy. Trying to know your final user perfectly and at what stage of the sales process you find each one will help you fine-tune the strategy and cause impact with the right message at the right time. Defining your Buyer Persona will help you find clues about the interests, needs, and problems of your ideal client.
When you know your "Buyer Persona" or ideal customer you can create the perfect content for your email marketing campaigns, that is in tune with the needs and interests that are important your client.
What is a buyer persona?
The Buyer Persona is the fictitious representation of the ideal client. This presentation is made based on a series of questions that will make you discover what the needs, ideals, tastes and habits of that final consumer are. The detailed knowledge of your clients will allow you to develop direct and effective strategies that you can transfer to your email marketing campaigns.
Defining your Buyer Persona for email marketing will give you the necessary knowledge and information to connect more authentically and personally with different groups of potential clients. You may be wondering: What if I have more than one type of client? Don’t worry, many businesses create multiple buyer personas to direct a strategy towards each segment.
With all this data you can design better aligned email marketing campaigns because you will have better knowledge of:
- Behavior: you can understand how your customers purchase and how much time they spend on theinternet, and use this information to know when and how to communicate with them.
- Needs and Objective: by knowing this, you will be able to create more valuable and relevant content for your client and, if possible, you could identify if you need another type of product or service to solve their problems and offer it to them.
- Problems that you face and what affects your purchase decision: with data like these, you will know if it is necessary to adapt the content or message’s tone or wording to help you overcome any doubts they may have, and to get them to take action.
At the moment of the decision to purchase a product or service, people will identify more with those brands that speak their language, that understand their needs and give them solutions to their problems. This is why is so important to know who you will be talking to - and why.
How a Buyer Persona is created?
Defining and creating a Buyer Persona is not something made on mere deductions. It is based on the study of data. These data are obtained through an analysis of the client that is carried out through a research and the study of the data that this small investigation delivers. It will take you a little time.
Step 1: Investigate your audience
The first step to get to know your "Buyer Persona" or ideal customer is to collect information. For this you will have to do a little research among your audience. You can start with your contact list and define which ones have been your best customers - those that have had the most interaction with your brand or those that have bought repeatedly to create a customer segment with common characteristics. It is also valid that you take into account customers with whom you have had bad experiences, so you can know what type of customer is not suitable for your product or service.
To collect this information you can use interviews, phone calls, surveys, forms or any format that allows you to ask questions to know your client.
It will be very important that you choose the right questions, those that are relevant to your email marketing strategy. You might consider asking questions that give you information about:
- Demographic data: age range, marital status, family income, location.Labor profile
- Personal or professional goals
- Shopping habits
- Types of content you consume
- Media and channels where you search for information
You can also get important information by analyzing statistics from your blog or website, to discover the most viewed pages, where traffic is coming from and which ones have the most relevant content.
Learn the most important statistics for email marketing from our functionalities.
Step 2: Analyze and identify
Once the research is done, you will have to analyze the data and find the answers that create a standard among your consumers. That is, find the most common characteristics among all the clients that have responded to your surveys.
In this step you may be able to identify more than one buyer persona, organize them by groups and create categories according to their characteristics to represent your different client prospects.
Note that you must select those who have are more appropriate for your brand and nearest to your strategy features.
Step 3: Structure the Buyer Persona
This is the moment to organize and give a face to our ideal client. In this stage you will have to give a name to your ideal client, set his age range, profession and a brief description of his tastes, personal, professional and daily habits. It is valid to create a short story, and if you prefer you can personalize it even more by giving it a photograph or image that represents it.
The objective of creating a Buyer Persona for email marketing is to represent the image of your ideal client, and to be able to see exactly what clients think, feel and long for. With this you can understand more clearly how your clients interact with your content, how they identify with your brand and why would they buy your product or service.
Design your email marketing campaigns focused on your Buyer Persona
Since you have defined the Buyer Persona for email marketing, it is time to transfer it to your Email Marketing strategies. Every decision you make about content, writing, products, and images should be oriented towards that prototype of that client you have designed.
Each Buyer persona you have defined can be found in a different stage of the sales funnel, so you will have to define different email marketing campaigns according to the needs of each client prototype.
Example: A person has just subscribed to your newsletter. It is time for you to send this person valuable content that allows you to discover how your brand can help solve this client’s needs. But, if this is a customer who has already bought your product, you should send promotional messages that reinforce the brand’s presence, offering discounts and new products.
Use the information you have gathered to segment your contact lists. Remember that a segmented contact list can reach your contacts with greater attention and make them understand how committed you are to them.
Giving a face to your ideal client will help you define the type of offer you should send and which call to action is most attractive to your client.
Complementing your Email Marketing with the Buyer Persona dynamics will help you create more effective campaigns, because they will be focused on what your users are looking for, and will teach you when it is the right moment to execute necessary changes.
Learn more about strategy for effective campaigns in our Blog.