Author: Armando Roggio / Source: Practical Ecommerce
Emerging technologies make it possible to move segmentation and personalization models beyond marketing personas to distinct, individual customer profiles.
The ability to collect customer information, organize it (i.e., big data), and draw insights from it (i.e., machine learning) makes it possible for marketers to evolve.
This evolution from buyer personas to individual profiles can provide superior personalization and an enhanced experience for shoppers. In turn, if retailers offer a more personalized shopping experience, they may sell more products.
Marketing Personas
Marketing personas are composite sketches or representations of your business’s most important customer segments. These sketches stem from information about your customers’ demographics, behavior, and motivation. This customer data is collected, analyzed, aggregated, and organized into groups or cohorts. These cohorts become the building blocks for a buyer persona.
For example, a retailer that sells workwear from brands such as Carhartt, Walls, Dickies, or Berne might have a marketing persona like this.
NAME: | Tom |
OCCUPATION: | Construction foreman |
INCOME: | $52,000 per year |
AGE: | 42 |
GENDER: | Male |
RELATIONSHIP: | Married with children |
HABITATION: | Suburban home owner |
REGION: | Pacific Northwest |
EDUCATION: | High school, some college |
GOALS: | Comfort on the job, durability, acceptance within peer group |
The “Tom” persona could guide some marketing decisions.
Personas help us understand groups of customers and prospects, which enables us to (a) deliver relevant marketing messages, (b) segment email lists, and (c) decide what to write about in a blog post.
In fact, personas are now and will likely remain an important marketing tool, but they are not the end of customer understanding.
Personalization
Personas help marketers understand or think about groups of shoppers. This approach is a lot better than just making guesses about what shoppers want.
Guessing, unfortunately, is what a lot of retailers do.
With personas, marketers don’t have to rely…
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