Blog Email Marketing and SMS

Create a buyer persona for your email marketing

Imagen Create a buyer persona for your email marke

In marketing, we often use the concept of "target", understood as a group of people to whom a campaign is directed. In email marketing, it would be equivalent to the segmentation of our database to choose, for example, customers between 18 and 25 years old who have purchased in the last month. But there is also the concept of "buyer persona", which is a much more specific profile.

A "persona" is an idealised representation of a specific group of users, customers or any other group that the sales team is interested in knowing. The "buyer persona" concept refers to those potential users or customers that we want to attract as they haven't bought from us yet. This nuance is the key to distinguishing the type of messages that we send them and that is why it is possible to have several profiles, depending on the moment in which they are concerning our brand.

Why is important to define a "buyer persona" for your campaigns

A "buyer persona" will help you to better understand your ideal customer during the process of buying a product or service and, therefore, what type of content they are interested in receiving from you. This profile can be applied to any of the marketing strategies you are using, including social media, and will help you to better segment your email marketing campaign.

It is much easier to plan your subscriber acquisition by knowing who you are targeting rather than targeting everyone in general. And it is also more profitable in the long term if you know the needs of that person, i.e., they like to spend the weekend with their family, to give gifts only at Christmas or share information on social networks. With this information, you can optimise the timing, content and design to achieve better results.

You can also get more engagement if you know that they will need a series of automated messages, for example. Inbound marketing is a good ally in this regard because it focuses the sales funnel so that the buyer persona ends up becoming a customer, making the list more beneficial to the business.

If you use email marketing as a loyalty tool, rather than a "buyer persona", you need a "customer persona". The way to make them is very similar because the only thing that changes is the data with which they are built because their relationship with your company changes and that is why you need a different profile.

In fact, "buyer personas" are useful for the whole company and that is why it is common to create a couple of them. Another complementary option is to create negative buyer personas, i.e. profiles of people you do not want as customers. In a digital marketing strategy, this could be, for example, someone who clicks but never ends up buying or, in general, someone who does not have the same values as the company.

Tips for creating a profitable "buyer persona"

The starting point for creating a "buyer persona" is information that is as realistic as possible. It is usual to start with the demographics of the target audience and get as specific as possible. A "buyer persona" is a representation of a customer, not of your entire clientele: it has a specific age, gender, education, profession, family, concerns... and all the characteristics you could know that personalise who you would like them to be.

This sketch can even have a name and a face for internal identification, but, above all, it has to be useful. The information you include in the profile must allow you to know their needs, i.e., their purchasing brakes or the motivations that would make them consider you as a service provider. You should also include any references that may influence their decision-making, such as favourite brands, buying habits or their use of technology.

You can consult with your customer service or sales department, or also take advantage of email marketing to get this information by doing a survey among your customer database: focus your questions on the first stages of their customer journey (how they met you or why they bought), not on the current ones (how much they spent last month or what events they would like you to organise). This way you can have a reference that will help you to really shape it.

Always remember that the key to this exercise is to extract data you can use to communicate better with that person and, by extension, with your potential customers. There is no point in including unrepresentative traits because you might end up focussing on what doesn't matter to the majority and losing the focus and effectiveness of your message.

How to apply it to your next campaign

A "buyer persona" will allow you to create better segments and content more relevant to what your potential customers might be interested in. On the one hand, you can tag contacts with the reference name of their profile. The easiest way is to take advantage of the connection with your CRM, although you can also do it manually by creating groups of contacts as in the following example:

Imagen

On the other hand, when you prepare campaigns for your "buyer persona", imagine that you have them in front of you and you will surely focus the content better. There are many aspects that you may have recognised as important: the worthiness of the return process, appropriateness of shipping costs or taste for cross-selling promotions... but also what arguments they consider most important, emotions they like to feel or decisions they find difficult to make.

Based on that, you can create more targeted campaigns, for example by explaining more visually the guarantees of online shopping or the advantages of related services. Segmentation will then be useful to create truly personalised messages.

With dynamic content, you will save time and be able to send different versions of a newsletter depending on the "buyer persona" you are targeting. For example, according to gender:

Imagen