E-commerce websites can increase their traffic by 210% if they can identify their ideal customer profile (ICP) and build an ideal customer persona (Rock Content).
That shows how important it is for every e-commerce business to have a persona on the sheet before starting any marketing effort.
This blog will be your cheat sheet on the importance of customer personas as an e-commerce business owner and how they can affect your business.
It will provide you with all the essential details regarding the generation of e-commerce customer personas and how they impact businesses.
What is an ideal customer persona?
An ideal customer persona is a fictional representation of your target audience. It means a detailed profiling of one type of customer who will most likely use your products and services.
The persona includes demographic, psychographic, and behavioural information: age, gender, location, interests, values, lifestyle, buying habits, and online behaviour.
They will help guide product development to meet the needs of your target market and align all your marketing efforts with your business goals. They will also help you focus your attention on qualified prospects.
How will building a persona help your eCommerce business?
Building a customer or buyer persona requires a lot of effort. Most businesses consider whether the buyer persona will help their business. The answer is yes.
E-commerce customer personas help you identify your targeted audience, customer needs, expectations, and buying power. They have become essential for businesses as customers have become more specific about their demands and aware of their preferences.
Many outside factors impact their decision-making, such as the influence of ongoing trends. Customers easily shift from one brand to another if they cannot find a specific product fulfilling their needs.
A study conducted by International Brand Equity revealed that companies that use personas see a 14% increase in client retention and a 19% increase in revenue.
The step-by-step guide for building a customer persona
Build an ideal customer persona for your business by following these steps:
- Research and data collection
- Identify Goals and Motivations
- Know your audience
- Discuss the e-commerce persona with your team.
1- Research and data collection
The first step is to analyze your target market. For instance, a business selling beauty products will study its customers’ buying power, skin tone, and age.
The first step is gathering relevant customer data. Use tools like Google Analytics to track website visitors and understand key demographics such as age, gender, location, and purchasing behaviour.
This would reveal patterns in how customer segments interact with the site, what kind of products they are interested in, and what patterns they follow before purchasing a certain product.
How to use Google Analytics for data collection
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can provide valuable insights for your e-commerce business. It offers different features, such as page views, bounce rate, time on site, conversions, audience segmentation, goal tracking, and custom reports.
By analyzing these metrics, you can identify how your target audience sees your site, what infuriates them, what motivates them, where they feel frustrated, where they click the most, and where the traffic originates from.
2- Identify goals and motivations related to customer persona
It’s extremely important to know what customers think of your business. What hinders their browsing, and what do they expect more from you? The goal of creating a customer persona is to answer all these questions.
Reviews, surveys, and comments on social media can disclose all this information. Creating empathy maps also helps to display the customer’s journey: what goes through their mind, what their thoughts, emotions, and actions are, and what hurts them while surfing your website.
You must be able to understand what your customers want to achieve, not only the problems they are trying to solve but also their broader expectations, such as personal or professional goals.
3- Know how customers interact with your brand
You must create a customer journey map to identify how a person interacts with your brand, from the initial awareness stage to the final purchase point.
First, you need to identify the origin of your traffic, whether it’s social media channels, Google ads, search engine results, or friend recommendations.
After the awareness phase, customers analyze your brand to determine whether it fits their needs. They will also analyze your competitors, so make sure you have an edge over them.
Now, if your customers have made a decision and taken a desired action, like purchasing, congratulations—you have won this marathon.
4- Team consensus on the eCommerce customer persona
This is a very crucial step. You might need reviews from your team members. All the marketing and administrative teams should clearly view your target customers, their weaknesses, and how to persuade them to buy from you.
Top tools for building a powerful customer persona
Building a persona is a multi-step process. Here are some of the most effective tools to create an ideal customer persona.
1- “Make My Persona” by Hubspot
Make My Persona is a great and easy-to-use tool provided by HubSpot. It comprises different steps that you need to follow to create an end product, i.e., the ideal customer persona. You add demographics such as age, race, gender, and nationality to the software, and it will provide you with a clear picture of your audience.
This tool is very effective for new ecommerce businesses. To collect demographics, you can always use Google Analytics. It provides you with a very detailed concept of your target audience.
2- Semrush’ “Persona Builder”
Semrush is an SEO tool, but it also provides a tool named Persona Builder. It helps you create detailed customer profiles by combining customer data with their online behaviour. This will help your marketing team understand customers’ online habits and inspirations, creating clear profiling.
3- Xtensio
Xtensio is another tool for creating effective personas. It is versatile and simplifies the process of creating personas for e-commerce businesses.
With customizable templates, behavioural insights, customer goals, and pain points, Xtensio helps you create a ready-to-use e-commerce persona that will give all the details about your target customers.
Other tools that aid in persona building: Customer feedback tools
Customer feedback is also very important in building an applicable persona. It is extremely important to know what your customers think of your brand. What do they expect more from your company? All these factors determine the future of your e-commerce business.
Some of the most common tools used to gather customer feedback are:
These tools will help you create online surveys and feedback. You can also get reviews and recommendations from your customers through these tools.
Apple’s customer persona: a perfect example
Apple targets a specific customer who values innovation and design and loves a premium experience. The typical user is urban, advanced, tech-savvy, well-educated, and has a good income. They like the latest technology and trends and want their devices integrated, looking good, and easy to use. They also prefer to stay loyal to Apple and appreciate its exclusivity and reputation for making high-quality, reliable, and stylish products.
Conclusion
An ideal customer persona is essential for your e-commerce brand. A deeper understanding of your audience is the first thing at the core of all your marketing efforts. If you don’t know where and who to sell to, you can never make them buy what you offer. If you fail to trigger their emotions, your product will fail to sell. With your ideal customer, grow your brand and boost your revenue.
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FAQs
How to create an ideal customer persona?
Build an ideal customer persona for your business by following these steps:
– Research and data collection
– Identify Goals and Motivations
– Know your audience
– Discuss the e-commerce persona with your team.
What is an e-commerce persona?
An e-commerce customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal audience. It means a detailed profiling of one type of customer who will most likely use your products and services. The buyer persona would include demographic, psychographic, and behavioural information: age, gender, location, interests, values, lifestyle, buying habits, and online behaviour.
What is persona with example?
An e-commerce customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal audience. It means a detailed profiling of one type of customer who will most likely use your products and services.
Apple’s success will give you proof of its strong persona. Apple has crafted perfect e-commerce customer personas that focus on each of their customers, thus being a significant driving force behind their success. At the core of the strategy by Apple is an innovatively advanced, tech-savvy individual who appreciates innovation, design, and premium experience.
