3.1 Digital Customers
An analysis of your digital customers is essential to give a clear picture of existing customers and whoever else you are looking to target. It also makes sense to look at how your organisation intends to differentiate itself from the competition
An effective approach here is to develop customer personas.
Customer Personas
A persona is a fictional profile that is usually developed according to research into a particular target audience. They can help you understand the characteristics and behaviour of your customers.
Creating customer personas helps brings to life who your existing customers are and their motivations. Personas also help to get buy-in across your organisation in helping to paint a picture and bring to life your customer profiles. When creating personas, the majority of the work can be completed by extracting data from your CRM system and analytics, and then build on this to create a profile picture of your existing customers.
For an e-commerce retailer, information you could consider extracting from your CRM might include:
- Male to female ratio
- Age profile
- Location details
- Purchase history
- Method of purchase
- Route to purchase (e.g. through a search engine, email newsletter, social media, or a combination)
- Frequency of purchase
Based on this data, the next stage is to turn this data into more of a personality that your organisation can relate to. For example, next is an example persona for a fictional online retailer.
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