Table Of Contents:

1. Real Buyers Persona examples from the big guys
2. How to create Buyer Personas for your e-commerce business?
3. How can you create buyer personas?

What is a Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas are research-based, modeled representations of:

• Who buyers are?
• What are their goals?
• How they think and, buy?
• Why they make such buying decisions?
• Where do they buy?
• When do they decide to buy?

“Out of 50,000 MUVs, the Primary Conversion is an impressive 27.3%, but the Secondary Conversion is just 14.6%.“

Change the numbers according to the size and performance of a company and you get the language your CRO guy or your Marketer speaks. It makes sense to keep metrics on fingertips and refer to data when it comes to deciding what converts and what doesn’t. What doesn’t make sense is –Your customers are not just a metric in your funnel, they also have a personality. Click To Tweet

They have traits such as age, location, hobbies, income and many others that influence almost everything they do on your website and elsewhere. It is impossible to understand individual user personality, given the massive customer base of consumer-facing companies. The hack to achieve it is building buyer or customer personas.

Real Buyers Persona examples from the big guys

Have you ever tried to download a resource from HubSpot? The flurry of questions they ask presents a complete profile of a prospect (you) even before they look at their analytics dashboard. The emails and pitches you receive after that are tailored according to the consumer persona you helped them create by answering those questions.

Have a look at their list of questions:

There are 12 questions and a checkbox – 13 in total. The comprehensive questionnaire helps build a detailed persona overall, but it does have a big catch. A tiny percentage of people are comfortable answering survey questions and talk about a 13-question long one!

Similar is the case with any other enterprise level companies or even the mid-level B2B guys. But for SMEs in general and consumer-centric SMEs in particular, building a B2B buyer persona by asking your visitors a 10 question long survey is the sure shot to them bouncing off.

For the big guys in the market, they can bear losing a few leads to get more qualified ones. The question is, can YOU?You obviously can’t!

So, when almost all the literature around creating buyer personas exert on asking your users certain questions and make them fill-up forms, how is this post going to help you?

There is this thing to remember before you delve down in anticipation of building buyer personas efficiently than ever. Effective buyer personas are built and developed by targeted buyer persona questions and a set of structured questions is called a survey. I know you don’t like the world but there’s one thing that can change the fate of a survey. Forgive me for the Steve Job reference but,

How to create Buyer Personas for your e-commerce business?

All of this brings us to the ‘hack’ that I was talking about. It is nothing but a persona templates that makes your questionnaire fun to fill. Easier said than done, right? Indeed. So, I will take you through some examples and tips on how to make your persona quiz (surveys are boring, remember?) to a whole different level.

A. Use visuals to the maximum.

A picture is worth a thousand words. So, why use just five words instead? Use a thousand! The use of images not only enhances the look of your questionnaire but also diminishes the effort needed from the user, in answering the questionnaire.

B. Get rid of unnecessary fields.

If you are a B2B firm, asking your user about his position in the company makes sense but asking his income doesn’t. On the contrary, if you are a B2C e-commerce business, his income matters more than his position. Choose the parameters that matter to you and minimize the length of your questionnaire.

C. Don’t make them type.

Using visuals will naturally reduce the efforts needed by the user. Additionally, you can employ checkboxes and drop-downs to reduce the typing effort required even further. Remember, the easier it is to fill, the more respondents you get for your questionnaire.

D. Make it fun.

There is no science to it anyways. Plus, nobody can actually give you a guideline of how to make anything fun. However, the thumb rule that I follow, while designing it for our clients, we focus on quirky copy, vibrant imagery and also, the above 3 points.

To illustrate all that has been said in this post till now, I have included one of the most innovative questionnaires I have come across. I hope it helps.

How can you create buyer personas?

One of our notable e-commerce clients wanted us to help them creating buyer personas for them, through the tools we pioneer in. We figured out the challenges they and the industry at large was facing and our customer success team, came out with something like this:

The small questionnaire was designed kept in mind all the previously mentioned points. It is a treat to the eyes, with beautiful imagery. It’s easy for the user as he is not forced to type, at all and with the Superheroes coming to your rescue, it is fun as well.

At the end of the survey, you not only get a rough sketch of your buyer persona but also a user who happily gave his details without being bored out of his guts.

Obviously, there are more than one way of implementing this. The easiest and most effective way is through WebEngage, as it needs no code changes nor any specific landing pages. Having said that, even if you are not a user of WebEngage and still the trick excites you, you can create a landing page with the survey hard-coded and promote the link through different marketing channels you possess.