Every day, businesses seek new ways to reach their target audience in the most seamless ways and one of these ways is through buyer personas. According to research done by HubSpot, using buyer personas made websites 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users. The same research also shows that creating personalized emails based on these personas drives 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. This article highlights how you can use buyer personas effectively in your email marketing strategy.
What Are Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas or audience personas refer to a fictional characterization of your ideal customer based on certain information about them and how they use your products or services. This is one of the most effective ways to build your ideal and largest target markets without getting confused. Doing this allows you to easily tell who you are building your products for and who to target when it’s time for publicity. When building your email marketing strategy, you need buyer personas to make it easier to write the perfect email and market your services to the right people at the right time.
Through these personas, companies can easily communicate with their audience in the language they best understand. Customers can now feel seen as they receive targeted marketing that is more relatable. Research has shown that 44% of B2B marketers use buyer personas, creating a mix of opportunity and competition, and you don’t miss out on the opportunity it presents.
Steps in Creating Buyer Personas for Email Marketing
While creating buyer personas is effective, you also need to ensure you have the right components. This has been shown to help improve conversion rates and below are steps to help you create great buyer personas for your email marketing strategy.
Step 1: Name the persona
As you get started with creating your personas, the first thing you want to do is give it a name. This helps paint a picture of a real person, even though it’s fictional. This is especially important if you will be creating more than one audience persona for your business. Name them according to what they represent or the group you are targeting.
Step 2: Define the goal
The persona you have just created targets a group of people with an unmet need. Your primary goal will be to meet the needs of this person based on the characteristics you have built in their profile. So, you want to clearly define your smart goal for each persona and gradually work towards it while including it in your marketing strategy.
Step 3: Conduct thorough market research
Don’t assume you know everything about your ideal customers, regardless of how long you’ve been in business. Every business needs to conduct market research, which will involve talking to and engaging real-life people who are potential customers. Gather as much data as you can, using different tactics; this includes the use of surveys, questionnaires, and interviews.
Combine the external data with internal data from team brainstorms and stories from real-life people who need your product or service. The result will give you an idea of who your ideal customer is and you can use that to build your buyer personas instead of just speculating from random ideas and imaginations.
Market research can be sometimes tedious but you can save some time and reach out to a marketing firm to guide you through the process.
Step 4: Understand your demographics and target market
One of the key components in creating buyer personas is your demographics. Who are you selling to? Where are they from and what age group do they represent? You can look into existing customer data or use your market research to determine your demographics.
Key demographics include:
- Age: in email marketing, the kind of emails you write for the younger generation might be different if you are targeting boomers.
- Gender: if your products target mostly women, there will be no point in having men as your primary audience. Also, how both genders interact with emails differ.
- Geographic location: this is especially important if your business is limited to a geographic location. If you sell mostly online and have to do home deliveries, take note of places where that might be difficult to achieve.
- Income: sometimes, your product might not be ideal for someone who isn’t earning up to the average salary in the country.
- Family situation: this focuses on whether they are single, in a relationship, or married with or without kids. This can influence their purchasing ability.
Getting your demographics right can help you go where the needs are and interact with your audience in the best possible way.
Step 5: Know how people get to know about your business
This can also be determined from your demographics. Where will your target audience most likely spend the bulk of their time? If you are targeting millennials and gen Zs, they will most likely stumble on your business online, perhaps on Instagram or TikTok. However, people of the older generation can spend most of their time on Facebook or interact with their colleagues at work.
Questions you should ask while conducting your research include:
- How did you hear about our business?
- If it’s on social media, can you specify which platform?
- Were you already familiar with our business before making a purchase or did it take a while?
- If it took a while, how long, and what was your deciding factor?
You can make options available to make it easier to fill out the survey. If you already have an established business, you can include a questionnaire or feedback form after every purchase from a customer. This will help you better understand how to reach your target audience.
Step 6: Note customers’ objections, frustrations, and concerns
No business is perfect on day one. Constantly check with your customers and target audience to know what their frustrations are about your industry and how to tackle them. This may include pricing, shipping, delivery times, returns, etc.
Step 7: Review
The best way to improve is to constantly review your buyer personas and marketing strategy. See what works and what doesn’t and work on how to improve them. This will involve continually communicating with your customers and learning from them to improve your buyer personas.
Bottom Line
Buyer personas are effective over time and you can use this to your advantage. However, you can’t create a persona without a marketing strategy to go along with it. The MailDrip team understands this and has decided to create a free marketing strategy template tailored to your business. Simply fill out the form below to have access.
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