Improve Personalization with Buyer Persona Insights (Top 7)
8 Min. Read
Creating a well-researched buyer persona to boost sales is similar to asking customers to provide their ‘size’ when adding items to the cart–absolutely essential. Whether you wish to increase your bottom line or drive user happiness via personalization, buyer persona delivers on all accounts, and there plenty of buyer persona insights that can be leveraged easily.
Buyer Persona Insights
Evidence Based Buyer Persona Insights
The data supports using buyer persona insights to improve personalization. There are many benefits, examples below.
- Increased readability and brand visibility: According to research by MLT Creative, using buyer personas in an email campaign can boost the open rate by 2x and the click-through rate by 5x.
- Optimized and effective website UX: Furthermore, data by HubSpot claims that “Using marketing personas made websites 2-5x more effective and easier to use by targeted users.”
- Increased market share: Business Grow reveals that 3-4 personas usually account for over 90% of a company’s sales.
- Increased revenues and lead in-flow: Finally, as per the MarketingInsiderGroup, a staggering 93% of companies who exceed the lead and revenue goals, segment their database by buyer persona.
The writing is on the wall: Having a strong buyer persona can positively impact all areas of your business–from marketing and sales to customer support and customer experience. So if you haven’t invested the time, effort, and energy into creating a personalized buyer persona, the right time to do this was yesterday.
Now that you have a good understanding of why it is critical to have a 360-degree buyer persona in place, let’s look at the ‘how’ component.
Top-7 Buyer Persona Strategies that can Supercharge Your Personalization Efforts
Understanding your customers is central to all your efforts to personalize your content and offers. Below are seven ideas for improvement:-
1. Straighten up your data game:
If you want to provide a hyper-personalized marketing experience, your data game needs to be on point. In other words, collect user data at every opportunity possible–without looking like a creep. This is where a buyer persona comes into the big picture.
Luckily, you have customers on your side, with over 57% of shoppers willing to share their information in exchange for personalized offers. In fact, around 72% of consumers will only respond to personalized marketing messages.
Action Points:
- Collect data related to the customer’s buying behavior, personal likes and preferences, pain points, and pressing challenges. Here’s an example of a buyer persona that includes all the relevant data points:
- Instead of sending long questionnaires and surveys to your customers, question them periodically and keep gathering the information in a centralized place that is easily accessible across teams.
- Develop a list of attributes you wish to collect information on and create your persona-related questions around it.
- Clearly, communicate to the customer about why you’re collecting the data and set the right expectations so that the customer is more well-informed and more willing to answer, as Spotify’s email demonstrates below:
- Finally, assure the customers that their data is safe (and not being sold to a third party) because security is always a top-of-mind concern for the users. Understandably so.
2. Invest in a live chat tool to gain valuable insights into your buyer persona:
Investing in live chat software has better marketing returns than you’d expect. As per estimates, customers who use live chat spend up to 60% more per purchase than those who don’t.
But the real question is: How can live chat help create a comprehensive and accurate buyer persona? Here’s how:
- You can browse through the live chat interaction to capture the customer’s current pain-point and make tweaks to your product/service accordingly. Nordstrom’s live chat service functionality is an excellent example to consider for inspiration:
Here, the user is seen asking about delivery costs in the UK. You can create a dedicated FAQ page on your website which answers these types of frequently-asked customers to accelerate and boost the customer experience.
- You can integrate the live chat tool into your social media page (think: WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.) and analyze the conversation to gain a better understanding of your user and their needs as there are more than 48 billion social media users around the world today. Pretty Little Thing has integrated live chat services into WhatsApp in an effort to be more approachable to the customers:
Action Points
- Work towards creating a live chat conversation that engages your customers and personalizes their shopping experience as Modcloth’s live chat showcases below:
For this to happen, your agents need to be properly trained and need to have a thorough understanding of the product/service in question.
- Integrate a knowledgeable knowledge base into your live chat tool for instances when your live chat agent is unavailable so that customers can help themselves and benefit from a personalized experience, 24×7 as Aerie, American Eagle’s tool demonstrates below:
- Pay special attention to the content, tone, and language your agent uses on live chat to ensure that the conversation is warm, friendly, and user-oriented even when things go South.
3. Comb through your social media handles to understand your customer's buying choices better:
Customers are willing to have an honest conversation with brands on social media more than ever today. They vent their concerns openly. They celebrate their favorite brands open-heartedly. They freely share a treasure trove of information such as their shopping choices, the devices they use to shop, what time they check-in, what they’re liking (and disliking) about a particular brand, among others.
If you’re not capturing the data that users are posting on your brand’s social media handles, you’re missing out on a huge lead base and data-gathering opportunity.
Action Points
- Your social media strategy should reflect how you’re going to capture user data.
- You need to invest in social media monitoring or social listening and analytics tools that allow brands to engage with users as soon as there’s a relevant hashtag or when a user mentions/tags the brand. Here’s an example of a social listening tool, “Mention” which allows you to engage in real-time social media monitoring and provides data-rich, customizable reports:
In other words, you never miss out on any customer’s post/comment and are always responding to their queries instantly.
- You need to set up a social media team that’s constantly monitoring and analyzing the data that your agents/software is capturing month-on-month.
- You also need to look at what your competition is doing on social media and gather research-driven insights into how you can further improve your offering.
- Focus on the main topics that are shaping your brand’s narrative on the social media platform and make moderations/additions to the buyer persona accordingly.
4. Relook at your buyer personas based on the information gathered in real-time:
It is not enough to simply create a buyer persona and call it a day. You need to constantly revisit your persona, make changes to ensure that the persona is in sync with the current marketing trends, shopping trends, user-based trends, and preferences, etc.
Action Points
- When analyzing the accuracy of the buyer persona, keep an eye out for personalization. If your buyer persona reads (and sounds) generic with basic profile details, chances are it will cater to everyone (and hence, no one).
- Also look at whether or not the buyer persona factors in your ideal user’s thinking and mindset, which includes their attitude, behavior, perception, and beliefs. You need to be able to think like the buyer to drive on-point personalization. Following is an example of a buyer persona that effectively capture’s the customer’s worries, fears, etc.:
5. Include real-life quotes and snippets of conversation within your buyer persona:
Another integral qualitative element that can improve the quality of your buyer persona is integrating real-life quotes, sayings, and snippets from interactions with customers across varied communication channels (read: social media, live chat, telephonic interviews, email, and so on).
Action Point
- Once you’ve gathered real-life conversations, quotes, etc. from multiple sources, create a list of objections or questions that your users are most likely to raise with your CX and Sales teams. Look at the following example below to get your creative juices flowing:
Next, empower your team members to practice with each other, based on real-life scenarios and improve their capability to drive resonating and personalized conversations. In simpler words, let the team members role-play.
6. Focus on crafting the right message based on the buyer persona insights:
The next To-Do item on your checklist should be to create personalized messages and content so that it resonates well with your target audience. In fact, research indicates that persona-based content can increase customer engagement by 6x when targeting cold leads (10% versus 58%).
Action Points
- Laser-focus on the nitty-gritty, factoring in the ‘catch phrases used by customers,’ the SEO-optimized keywords, the common vernacular that customers use, among other things. Basically, ensure that your brand’s content is literally talking in the ‘customer’s language’ to sit better with your ideal user base.
- Ask users about what keeps them awake at night. Question them about their aspirations and motivations, and use that content to drive personalized communication. It will allow your users to feel that the brand truly ‘gets’ them in every sense of the term.
- Talk about how your product/service will benefit the user or add value to their lives instead of stressing about the product’s features/specifications.
7. Tie it all Together
Your data-gathering process is never going to be aligned and emerging from a ‘single’ location. You could be gathering information from your website, from within the app, from your emails and marketing campaigns, from interviews and polls on social media, among others.
All this information is of no use if the data is present in silos and if all your teams are not accessing it all together.
Action Points
- To capitalize on the information gathered, you need to collate every piece of information into robust software and make it accessible to teams in real-time. This is why it helps to transfer information on the cloud so that your sales, marketing, and customer support teams can access it on the fly.
- Drive a collaborative culture where teams are constantly seen sharing vital user-persona-related information with each other and can tap into each other’s learnings as well as experiences.
The Bottom Line
Quite simply, a personalized buyer persona acts as a blueprint for your brand–to approach customers the right way, to communicate with them with the right intent, and to demonstrate your brand in the ‘right light.’ If you want the accurate big-picture along with the short-term nuances that make your customers unique, creating a buyer persona and personalizing it is a must.
Moreover, it allows customers to connect deeper and more intimately with your brand as they feel inherently understood (and appreciated) by the brand. To wrap up, here are the top-7 strategies to embrace and supercharge your personalization initiatives using buyer persona as a strong foundational base:
- Straighten up your data game and focus on collecting user data (try Conversific).
- Invest in a live chat tool to gain valuable insights into your buyer persona.
- Comb through your social media handles to understand your customer’s buying choices better (and deeper).
- Relook at your buyer personas based on the information gathered in real-time as a thumb rule.
- Include real-life quotes and snippets of conversation within your buyer persona.
- Focus on crafting the right message based on the buyer persona insights.
- Tie it all together via a customer-centric collaborative culture.
Think we’ve missed out on any user-persona-based personalization hacks? Share your comments below, we’re all ears.
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