Conversion / Testing

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How to Develop Personas that Will Boost Your Conversion Rates Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Founding Editor, Web Marketing Today, Rocklin, CA - Jan 15, 2008

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An online business might have three or more main types of customers, each with different needs and different triggers that motivate a purchase. How do you design a website that can maximize the conversion rate for each of these customer types? Here are the steps:

1. Research Your Customer Base

Look at people who have purchased your goods or services recently. How might you categorize them? Begin with demographics: attributes such as age, gender, relative income level. What typical needs is this person seeking to meet? What kinds of offers motivate this person? What is this person's shopping method -- impulse buy or careful research? You can find out a great deal by interviewing your customer service representatives and sales people. Ask randomly selected customers to fill out a brief survey using an inexpensive service such as SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com), preferably soon after purchase. Conduct phone interviews with customers to learn more about their needs.

2. Develop Several Personas or Customer Profiles

Based on your research, narrow down your main customer types into two to four categories. Start with a few; you can always expand later. Now begin to write a brief profile of what a typical representative of this category might look like. Give him or her a name, location, age, marital status, salary range, job position, etc. What kind of background does she have? What periodicals, e-zines, or blogs does he read? What organizations might she belong to? What is his purchasing approach? What are her primary motivators? Do this for each customer type.

For example, you might meet these fine folks visiting wilsonweb.com:

 

• Ernest Hoboken, 62, Jacksonville, FL, is a newbie who needs to learn how to sell model railroad accessories online to create an income after retirement next year.
• Jennifer Herblock, 25, Schaumburg, IL., has recently been placed in charge of marketing for an eight-employee business and desperately needs to generate more traffic to her company's website.
• Morris Havener, 43, Boise, ID, is an Internet marketing consultant working on a customer project that requires repeated visits to the Web Marketing Today Research Room to review literature in the field.
• Cheryl Hopinskip, 31, Tucson, AZ, has been a website designer for two years, but sees the need to learn SEO so she can improve the performance of her clients' websites.

But go beyond the mere sentence or sketch that you see above. Use your research with along with your imagination. Write a detailed persona profile that fills a page or two. The more you can get into this person's skin, the better you and your copywriters can prepare sales copy that motivates this persona to purchase from you. Copy that is written for the "average" prospect, on the other hand, is written for no one in particular and often fails miserably.

 

3. Design a Sales System for Each Persona

Now carefully write landing pages designed for just this type of customer. You may start building a single landing page for each persona. But you may find yourself designing a series of pages -- a whole sales path -- that leads to the sale.

4. Segment Visitors into Sales Paths

The final step is to guide prospects into the correct sales paths on your site. With PPC advertising you have some control, since different customer types may have characteristic keywords they typically search on. But expect to segment your visitors from your site's key landing pages and direct them into the appropriate sales path. To see how segmentation is accomplished, study the homepages of Dell (www.dell.com) and Hewlett Packard (www.hp.com).

Is this a lot of work? Oh, yes! But if you follow these steps carefully, conversion rates will rise substantially.

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Note: We've just scratched the surface here. For more information see Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg, Call to Action (Thomas Nelson, 2006, ISBN 078521965X), their Waiting for Your Cat to Bark (Thomas Nelson, 2006; ISBN 0785218971), and MarketingSherpa's Landing Page Handbook (Second Edition; MarketingSherpa, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932353-70-9).