The Power of Great Buyer Personas for Targeting

Boost Your eCommerce Sales Funnel with Great Buyer Personas

Do you know who your customers are? Because if you don't, how can you possibly deliver a delightful digital experience, capture high-quality leads and move them along your eCommerce sales funnel? When you're not even aware of what your customers want or need from your brand, you can't possibly provide them with something that gives them value.

To create an effective eCommerce funnel and optimize it to streamline the customer journey, digital teams must have a clear idea of who they should target, what type of content they want to consume, and why. That's where great buyer personas come in.

The Impact of Great Buyer Personas

How crucial are buyer personas to your eCommerce sales funnel? Consider the following:

•  82% of enterprises report enhanced value propositions upon implementation of buyer personas
• 71% of organizations say they have surpassed lead generation and revenue goals after integrating great buyer personas into their sales and marketing strategies.

But most importantly, marketing personas help you identify and target the right customers. Great buyer personas give you more than just the surface details of your buyers. Instead, it delivers valuable, more profound insights into who your consumers are, including their thoughts, desires, motivations, and more. 

With a better understanding of your customers, you can build highly specific customer segments. This allows you to create more effective email lists and send targeted and personalized emails that are 50% more likely to be opened.

But more than personalized emails, buyer personas help your teams create and drive the most relevant content, fuel product development, perform effective sales follow-ups, and more. Thus, personas optimize your sales funnel, accelerating the buyer journey through the sales cycle while improving customer acquisition and retention.

5 Steps To Creating Accurate Personas

Great buyer personas effectively get the right people into your sales funnel and guide them to conversion. The tricky part is how you create personas for your business. Here's a 5-step approach to help you get started.

• Analyze your current audience: Detailed and thorough research into your audience will enable you to dive deep into your customers' characteristics and attributes. Leveraging reliable and recent customer data like digital experience analytics, purchase history, previous interactions, and browsing activities can help determine your best customers and what commonalities they share. Their similarities will help shape their detailed profiles, enabling you to start building personas with impressive accuracy.
  
• List down their most common details: After gathering all the relevant data, digital teams must wade through the information and responses to pinpoint their most common attributes. These include demographics (age, location, occupation, etc.), behavior, challenges (pain points), interests, and communication preferences. These details help you create accurate personas and mold your communication strategy. Knowing their wants, expectations, and pain points affects how you communicate with your audience.
  
• Categorize your personas: After collecting and narrowing customer information down to their most common attributes, the next step is to categorize these characteristics into separate personas. Determine people in your audience who share the same pain points and goals and add them into their respective categories. Each category represents a specific persona.
  
• Name your personas and give them a story: Giving your personas names and background stories adds that distinctive human element. Names matter in the marketing world because marketers tend to visualize the people they target. Naming your personas and providing them with their stories makes it more personal, empowering marketers to treat these semi-fictitious characters as real human beings and helping them create tailored, personalized content.
  
• Study your competitors' audience: You must also look at the competition's audience base to see what works for them. Your digital experience teams must understand the competitor's value proposition, strategy, and positioning. This enables your teams to see which audience segments they're targeting, which ones they're attracting, and how their audiences intersect with yours.

Get The Right Customers Into Your Sales Funnel

With accurate buyer personas, you can target the most valuable prospects at the top of the funnel, reduce drop-offs at the awareness stage, and positively impact your sales funnel conversion rate.

When you utilize buyer personas, you can understand their pain points and questions. This allows you to discover answers to meet their needs, craft and deliver content explicitly curated to a particular customer segment, and put them on a frictionless customer journey.

Great buyer personas let you channel your marketing efforts to a specific character, helping you push an entire life story and narrative that your target customers can relate to and resonate with. Buyer personas lead to extraordinary results when executed strategically with videos, social media, email nurturing, and data analytics.