What is Personalized Marketing?

Understanding your customer is essential to success in the increasingly competitive & complex modern e-commerce landscape. Your customers are diverse in many aspects, requiring a dynamic strategy and nurturing the brand-customer relationship, leading to healthy retention rates. The most efficient method for understanding and optimizing your connection with multiple customer types is to use persona data. Crafting a few main customer profiles based on persona data can help your team develop strong relationships with your customer base while creating a curated experience, increasing marketing efficiencies, and improving ROI.

What are Marketing Personas?

Strategy experts in e-commerce, brand, customer experience and marketing can refine and optimize strategy according to each persona. Financial teams can assess value and forecast ROI for each persona by understanding the nuances of these groups. Having a foundational understanding of this data allows each team member to visualize their direct impact on the customer relationship.

Also referred to as customer profiles, buyer’s personas, or clusters—Decile’s Customer Persona Analyses use Data Science modeling to identify clusters of customers that share similar demographic and behavioral characteristics. The analyses are performed on the group of customers that we can match and enrich with 3rd party data attributes.

The number of personas your brand has can vary based on the differences and similarities of the signals.

How to Use Marketing Personas in Personalized Marketing

Name your personas. Characterize these groups with high-level basics: where do they live, income, typical product purchases & UPTs, media habits, are they active or have unique interests? Describe them as you would know a friend. Being an advocate for your customer allows your brand team to understand your customer’s needs and wants, increasing brand trust.

Examples:

Devon is your high-value customer that lives on the west coast, is dual-income, has no kids, and purchases three items per transaction during non-sale periods. Their purchases are often summer-wear-related. Targeting Devon during special releases or collaborations is likely to hold their interest and increase purchase frequency.

Kelly is your east-coast bargain shopper that buys an average of five items per transaction, but only during sale periods. Targeting Kelly during a Winter “buy more, save more” promotion is the best use of their attention.

WHY ARE THEY USED:

Today, it’s essential for brands to stand out in a competitive eCommerce landscape and have an authentic voice and personality. Studying your personas allows for a highly-curated brand-customer partnership. Knowing when, how much, and how often to get your customers to buy enables you to enjoy the benefits of brand loyalty and the positive aspects of customer advocacy.

Personas outline opportunities for creating precise marketing strategies and tactics: know your customer as well as someone in your inner circle. A strong understanding of your customers allows you to develop marketing strategies and promotions for each type according to their purchase behavior. We often suggest new products to our friends and understand what aspects they’ll find valuable. Knowing when to engage the impulse shopper and when to hold off engaging with the bargain shopper increases return while respecting your audience’s diversity of attention span.

Persona-first strategy

Multiple personas for one campaign: Personas can be used as direct audiences in your retention targeting strategy, and lookalikes should be mirrored in a 1%-5% prospecting campaign.

Separate persona strategy

Your persona groups can be separated into different ad sets to allow enhanced personalization for each group

According to each persona’s personality/preference, tailoring brand voice, promotion type, seasonality, etc., should lead to a better relationship with those personas and, thus, better retention rates and revenue.
Acquiring more customers according to your strategy can lead to the appearance of changes in your personas. It’s best to check every six months to understand how your personas are morphing and mold your strategy accordingly.

Segmented-audience strategy with personas

Have a segmented value-based audience strategy that you’re happy with but still want to try personas?

A/B test your segmented audiences with similar attributes and value-KPIs against their corresponding personas and see which strategy performs better. You can add any essential segmented audiences to create a supercell with your personas.
Or create a separate persona retention campaign with a corresponding prospecting version. These personas can be excluded from your usual retention & prospecting campaigns to minimize overlap.

How do you involve personas in your e-commerce strategy? The simple answer is Decile—our platform helps your business grow profitably by empowering your 1-p data, forming insightful analytics, and harnessing a dedicated customer success team to guide you along the way.

To learn more, schedule a demo today!