Today I listened to a MarketingProfs’s webinar from March 7, 2007 and heard a different view point of the uses of Buyer Personas to really understand your customers (my earlier post here on personas) from expert Tamara Adlin. She talked about marketing successes companies have had using personas—like increasing sales, improving use of a web site and reducing help desk inquiries. Very insightful content for all of marketing, though targeted at product design.
Tamara co-authored a book The Persona Lifecycle, Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. Here’s my summary definition of personas gleaned from Tamara:
– Fake people (or concrete representations) based on real data
– Focused on goals and behaviors
– A tool to make customer data come alive
You gain at least two key benefits from developing/using personas according to Tamara Adlin:
- Focuses you clearly on customer goals: The basic exercise of building personas helps you focus on the experiences, goals, needs and problems of your customers. You put into the persona exercise all of your other data—ages, info gathered during site visits, user testing, focus groups, web surveys, etc. the personas make all of this data way more useful.
- Gives your whole team a common language: creating buyer personas within your company helps you all talk about customers with a common language. Common language helps you get to the essence of what your customers want more quickly. Your team actually begins to refer to the personas, because you get to know them so well.
3 Success Examples:
1. Medco Health improved conversions by using personas to redesign Medcohealth.com. They saw a 33 percent increase in the number on web site transactions and 26 percent increase in number of prescriptions ordered online. This will make your customer support team happy: the number of emails from users to the help desk dropped 18 percent.
2. Online gaming company Zylom.com saw big increases in sales. They built two key personas—a 32-year old woman and a 49-year old woman (Go girl power!). It boiled down to fact that the main ‘goal’ of these personas (customers) was to play games immediately when landing on the site. Not to download. So, see the stark difference below (slide from Tamara Adlin’s MarketingProfs presentation)in the old (on left) web site design that tried to get customers to download immediately. The new site encourages playing (trying) before buying.
Zylom.com realized a huge jump in sales because more visitors to site were able to quickly see that they could play the games. Which led to longer stays on the web site and more conversions (game sales).
3. Yahoo Tech actually uses their personas (not real people) to guide users. They cal lthem “Advisors”. See the site here with Yahoo Tech Advisors.
Complete MarketingProfs webinar archived here (Membership or fee required.) Personas 1: Breakthrough Customer Insight for Product, Website Design and More
How cool is that? What (more) could you learn about your customers if you sat with your team and built buyer personas?
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