To launch a successful website, you need to understand the real demands of the customers you want to target. Instead of making assumptions based on hearsay and conjectures, it makes sense to work with real data and arrive at concrete inferences about your target audience. This scientific data processing is defined as a customer persona. The result of this research will shed light on your potential customer’s profile in detail, which includes his defining traits, requirements, objections raised, areas that are troubling him, irritation points, demographics, and psychographics. Such thorough knowledge helps you to understand and influence the customer behavior of your niche.
Customer personas were used extensively by web designers to offer excellent user experiences based on individual characteristics or touchpoints. From their experience, it was seen that such profiling helps with building websites that are based on customer interactions. It was proven statistically that websites using customer personas and orienting the design accordingly found a 2 to 5% increase in its effectiveness, along with a similar increase in the smoothness of customer interaction with the website.
Defining Customer Persona and How to Implement it for your Website
1. Guidelines on Creating Customer Personas
When creating your website, work on the number of personas according to your potential customer base. You may start by creating a few profiles and continue adding as there is an increase in the number of visitors. The following tried and tested tips will help you to create a proper customer persona.
2. Asking Questions
As in the case of most types of customer profiling, you need to ask the correct questions to your potential client. While these questions can vary from inquiring about the demography of the customer to asking what is his or her ideal navigation experience on the Internet. Your queries should address the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the discussion points instead of just the ‘what’ of the point.
While there are many suggestions about how to prepare persona questionnaires on the Internet, you should take care that your question set is relevant to the website’s purpose. It should also take into account your website’s design style and the type of market you intend to enter – whether it’s business-to-business (b2b) or business-to-customer (b2c).
3. Obtaining Information
This objective can be achieved in a number of ways, but the following two methods are relevant for the purposes of creating customer personas.
4. Surveys
To avoid assumptions regarding the possible answers to your questions, it is best to conduct customer surveys. Prepare an effective survey and email it to your list of subscribed customers. This exercise will provide you with feedback from individual customers having actual issues and thoughts on your website’s subject. You may also place such surveys in triggered e-mailers. Take the help of dedicated online tools which let you create professional survey forms with ease. You can also use pop-ups as a means of collecting data for a customer persona. In this context, you may offer something to the customer in return for his efforts.
5. Interviews
Apart from obtaining documented feedback from customers, having a one-on-one discussion with them regarding their likes and dislikes, expectations and irritants will also provide a wealth of information to create customer personas. To schedule such a meeting, start by calling or emailing your customer. Based on their consent, continue by providing some background information about yourself and the purpose of the interview. Provide some more information during subsequent follow-ups. Try to arrange to speak individually instead of other modes of communication. You may also use online audio or video conversation tools to good effect here.
6. Utilize Collected Data Efficiently
Now that you have enough data for creating customer personas, collate the findings to create a single fact sheet page. Try to attach a name and face to each profile for easier recollection and to associate website modifications as per customer group. Also, ensure you keep updating these profiles, as customer tastes and preferences are always changing based on market trends.
Thus, for maximum effectiveness of your website and impressing everyone among your target audience, it is a good practice to create well-researched customer personas. These profiles will help you to implement focused strategies that will create a positive impact on your customer base and ultimately result in higher conversions and positive customer experiences.
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