What is a Buyer's Persona? How Can It Increase Your Ecommerce Sales?

Your sales will see a noticeable increase if you can address all your customers in a more personalized manner. Let me explain. Prospective customers are more likely to buy a product if you can make them feel that a specific product or offer aligns with their needs, desires, and budgets. How can you find out what someone wants and what marketing strategy will succeed for a target group? That’s when buyer personas come into play. A buyer persona helps marketers expose products that are ideal only for the target audience. Thus, you can increase ecommerce sales with a low customer acquisition cost. 

Definition of a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona comprises the psychological, demographical, and personal characteristics data of a customer. It works like a blueprint that provides necessary and relevant information about buyers. After analyzing buyer personas, you can understand who your ideal customers are, what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling, and how well your products can attract them. These pieces of information play a critical role in running successful marketing and advertising campaigns. Moreover, you can enhance buyers’ shopping experience by making the best use of buyer personas. 

How to Build Effective Buyer Personas to Boost Ecommerce Sales

Buyer personas will inform you of customers’ expectations from your ecommerce website. Once you know what customers expect from you, you can restrain from promoting irrelevant products to them. Thus, you will get more conversions with less marketing costs. So, you need to build strong buyer personas to understand your customers more deeply and generate more sales as a result. 

Consider Facts & Figures

One of the common mistakes business owners commit is they articulate buyer personas depending on assumptions, intuitions, or hunches. You can't gamble like that when you have to invest money in marketing activities based on these data. Therefore, it’s crucial to believe only in facts and figures. Actual data often contradict popular assumptions. We recommend you stick to data-driven results. 

Gather Necessary Data

Quality data are the powerhouse of buyer personas. These data are easy to access if you use enterprise eCommerce solutions to run your business. You can't build a single buyer persona without considering both qualitative and quantitative insights. These data consist of a few sets of information. The five major data categories are as follows. 

Demographics: Demographic information covers the basic data required to identify each persona. These data are good enough for most online retailers but your chances of more sales will increase if you can dig deeper. Common demographic questions can provide you with the following information about the buyers.

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Gender
• Education
• Occupation
• Family Size
• Relationship Status

Psychographics: You will be able to know the psychological aspects of your customers by analyzing their psychographics. Buyers’ habits, personality traits, attitudes, depressions, disappointments, mistakes, insecurities, happiness, expectations, openness, tolerance, etc. combinedly form the psychographics of customers. 

Income Level: This point is crucial to any business. You’ll miss out on sales if your products seem to be too expensive or too cheap for potential customers. Therefore, it’s important to determine how solvent your target market is and what price point resonates the most with their expectations. 

Online Presence: There are several marketing channels available on the internet. You need to find out which customer uses which platform for what reasons. Without this information, you will not be able to reach the right customer on the right social media. It’s also important to know what device they use while accessing their social media accounts. 

Interests: People’s hobbies, interests, birthdays, anniversaries, occasional plannings, dreams, and wishes directly affect their shopping behaviors. When you know all these factors, it becomes easier to successfully target the right customers. Make sure your data are credible and usable for a pitch-perfect marketing strategy. 

Adopt Effective Data Collection Methods 

You must have factual data ready at your disposal to build effective buyer personas for your ecommerce business. These sets of information come in mainly two forms such as qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data refer to the descriptive data derived from interviews, conversations, observations, questionnaires, and more. These data provide information about qualities, characteristics, and perspectives. Whereas, quantitative data refer to numerical information comprising the value of different metrics based on a set of variables. You can collect quantitative data by using web analytics, surveys, shopping data, transaction history, industry data, market research, and more. You will get quality buyer personas by utilizing these analytical data. 

Categorize Your Customers 

At this step, we’ll learn how to segment your customers into small groups. Identifying customers is the prerequisite for running a successful marketing campaign. The classification of customers is as follows. 

• Browsers: These are the visitors who browse your website often but never convert into customers. You can send them newsletters, offers, and discounts through emails to persuade them to buy from you. 
• New Comers: They are new subscribers who are here through any of your marketing channels. Offer them a first purchase discount to win their hearts right away. 
• Confused Buyers: They are customers who leave their cart without completing the order. They’re hesitant buyers. Remind them about their choice with a persuasive email. These buyers are likely to turn into customers with a gentle push. 
• First-time Customers: This segment refers to customers who just have made a purchase. Focus on inducing them to buy more by suggesting personalized products. Upselling and cross-selling are two effective ways in this regard. 
• Return Customers- The VIPs: Repeat customers are great assets to an ecommerce store. They earn the title VIP by spending a lot of money on your online store. Pamper them with exclusive offers. Send them information about replenishment and wishlist items. Make them feel special in every possible way. 
• Impulse Buyers: These are the people who make impulsive purchases without giving them any critical thought. They are easy to manipulate and convert into customers with minimal marketing efforts from the company’s end. Keep them updated about new products and promote upselling and cross-selling to increase your sales. 
• Discount Hunters: These customers have a keen interest in availing discounts and special offers. They analyze each offer to get the best value for their money. Expose them to exclusive discounts and offer free shipping to facilitate sales. 
• Reluctant Ones: No matter how strong your marketing campaign is, some hearts are hard to win. These customers hardly buy anything from an online store. Attract them with customer reviews, testimonials, and other user-generated content. They’re reluctant to trust a seller, feed him with social proofs that speak for the quality of your products. 

Make Use of Buyer Personas

We hope you read all the above steps carefully. So, by now, you know what data you have. Let’s make use of that information to increase your ecommerce sales. Analyze all the collected data, organize each buyer persona, and interpret sales trends. Distribute these personas to your sales and marketing team. Ask them to come up with a set of strategies capable of generating expected conversions. 

Sometimes the buyer of a product is not the end-user. This is a critical fact related to buyer personas. You need to understand who you’re dealing with and act accordingly. So, add adequate information for both buyers and users to your product pages. It’s not possible to make substantial profits without making an all-out effort to increase your sales, using buyer personas.

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