The Power of User Personas in eCommerce Advertising

Guest post 1.3.2023. Reading Time: 6 minutes

Are you aware of your customers? How else do you provide an excellent digital experience, collect high-quality leads, and move them through your eCommerce sales funnel? When you haven’t learned what your consumers want or need from your brand, it’s impossible to supply them with anything of value.

Digital teams need to clearly understand their target audience, the content they want them to read, and why to build an efficient eCommerce funnel and optimize it to speed up the customer experience. This is where user personas come into action. 

The Power of User Personas in eCommerce Advertising

The influence of excellent user personas

How critical are customer personas to your eCommerce sales funnel? Consider the subsequent:

82% of organizations report improved value propositions after implementing customer personas.

After integrating user personas into their sales and marketing strategies, 71% of companies claim they have exceeded their lead generation and revenue targets.

Moreover, marketing personas assist you in finding and targeting the appropriate clients. Excellent user personas provide more than simply superficial information about your customers. Instead, it gives more profound and vital insights about your consumers, including their ideas, wants, and motivations.

A deeper understanding of your consumers makes creating highly specialized client categories possible, helping you construct more successful email lists and send 50% more likely to be opened since they are targeted and customized and lead to sales.

But user personas enable your teams to generate and drive the most relevant content, stimulate product development, and conduct successful sales follow-up, among other things. Consequently, personas enhance your sales funnel by expediting the user’s journey through the sales cycle and improving client acquisition and retention.

People are engaged with your product, which indicates that you’re doing something correctly.

Deciding who is on the opposite side of the connection is essential if you intend to maintain it. Businesses that frequently need to be more in touch with their customers can’t comprehend how their customers think and make purchase decisions.

Conversely, a company that guesses who its audience is or what they want need to be revised, resulting in lost revenue and consumers.

Creating user personas assists firms in better understanding and communicating with their target audience. It’s easier said than done, so we’ve created this guide to assist you in creating user personas that truly move the needle.

What does user persona mean?

User personas are fictional depictions of your ideal clients. A user persona is based on actual customer discovery and study into the target audience’s requirements, objectives, and observable behavioral patterns.

User personas allow you to enter the mindset of your target audience helping you to acquire useful information and make decisions based on the needs of your users.

Personas are particularly useful for evaluating the efficiency of functional UX design from the user’s perspective. 

User personas and grouping

A company analyzes its customers’ demographics, needs, and potential barriers to obtaining those needs by using behavior and psychographic data.

Psychographic segmentation makes the most of a user’s distinctive traits and psychological attributes. By segmenting clients based on psychological aspects such as behaviors, personality, lifestyle, attitudes, and social standing, businesses are able to forecast how users respond to tailored marketing initiatives.

Consequently, behavior and psychographic categorization are tremendously helpful for comprehending your visitors and gathering the necessary facts to construct user personas. This assists your team in advancing their marketing of mobile apps approach.

What is the recommended number of user personas?

Rarely does a business target only one audience. If you’re constructing an online presence, you are likely attempting to reach various audiences. In this instance, more than a single user persona is required, leaving you to determine how many to build.

A handful of dozen user personas is an excellent idea. However, you notice that the more you generate, the more similar your works get.

Develop a maximum of four user personas. The majority of brand audiences share traits with a selection of key personas. Adding additional user personas is unnecessary as it leads to a lack of focus and a disorganized creative process. Since the purpose of user personas is to acquire insight into most of your audience, four is plenty. 

How do you create a user profile?

Are you still trying to figure out where to begin? Include the following attributes in every user persona.

  • Name

User personas evoke a sense of realism. Naming them is the initial step. Avoid generic designations.

  • Photo

Always associate a face with a name. Some firms opt to utilize fictitious characters and celebrities as their personal photo. It’s not at all recommended to establish an identity that’s devoid of preconceptions and preconceived characteristics.

  • Personal tagline

Similar to a photograph, this helps to flesh out your persona so that they feel more natural.

  • Bio

Everyone enjoys a compelling backstory. Give your character a brief backstory. Where did they mature? Why did they select their current position? What activities do they indulge in their free time? Include some distinguishing characteristics.

  • Demography

You need to target users with specific interests, desires, and requirements instead of your perceptions. Incorporating demographic information enhances your knowledge and interaction with users, allowing you to relate to them as they want.

  • Personality characteristics

Your character has a limited attention span, right? Are they prudent? Do they make judgments rashly? Assigning personality qualities assists you in determining whether you want speedier site designs or the ability to compare prices.

  • Motivations

The objective is to learn how your user thinks by getting inside their brain. Moreover, what encourages people to utilize your product?

  • Objectives and frustrations

While the extent of a persona’s objectives and frustrations immediately relate to your company’s demands, it’s worthwhile to highlight goals that your persona has but that aren’t directly impacted by your product.

  • Favorite manufacturers and influences

You learn much about a person by examining the businesses and influencers they favor. The likelihood is that the marketing strategies employed by these firms and influencers also apply to you, allowing you to tailor your outreach accordingly.

How user personas benefit business

User personas are incredibly beneficial for business growth and development. They assist in discovering the many methods in which consumers look for, purchase, and utilize things, allowing you to concentrate on enhancing the experience for actual people using accurate data.

User personas provide several advantages to a business as listed below.

Create uniformity throughout the enterprise

User personas provide an organization-wide comprehension of your users, putting everyone on the same page. Personas establish a consistent and detailed understanding of each client target group inside your organization.

Signal user behavior

By obtaining insight into the histories of user personas, you have a better vision of: 

  • where your actual users spend their time
  • where they receive information
  •  in which social networks flourish

This data enables you to target and promote your products or services in locations where they are to be viewed.

Assist with user-centered reasoning

You and your team have devised a service or product that you believe would benefit your users, but is it something they desire? You’re confident enough to think your concept is brilliant, but what if you discover its outside demand after hours of brainstorming? User personas assist in reducing time and resource waste by explicitly concentrating on the user’s requirements.

Improve workflow for design and development

Personas enable you to acquire insight into user behavior and establish company-wide consistency. They’re also essential for assisting design and product managers in developing 

  • Superior products
  • Services
  • Strategies
  • User experiences

Better development ensures that you meet the requirements and preferences of your actual users.

Establishing product positioning

Because you leveraged user personas during the ideation and production phases, you are better positioned to place your product for marketing. User personas provide you with research to address the difficulties and challenges associated with product positioning.

Improved targeting

Personas enable you to modify and target your content so that it’s positioned strategically to attract consumers who are likely to be interested in it. Personas give insightful information to send your message to the appropriate audience at the right moment. In addition, they enable more efficient: 

  • market research
  • targeted advertising
  • usability testing
  • keyword research

Layout

Personas provide the data and perspective necessary to make objective judgments about constructing your brand’s messaging in the most consumed and commonly accepted formats, such as videos, social media posts, and articles. This helps you to develop engaging content that is tailored to the demands of each character.

Identification

Personas facilitate the identification of audience channel behavior insights. Where do they hold their conversations? What topics do they have an interest in? If you provide customized information where your audience is already active online, you then maximize the impact of their online behaviors on your business and content marketing.

In a nutshell, user personas enable more efficient company operations, including precise positioning and decision-making. It helps you to know about the behaviors and attitudes of your perfect consumer concerning the content strategy objectives you’ve established. 

Author

Fatema Aliasgar
Fatema Aliasgar is an experienced B2B and SaaS content writer based in Mumbai, India. She has done her Master's in Business Management and has written B2B content for seven years. She likes to read non-fiction and play board games with her kids during her free time.