The goal of publishing content as an e-commerce business is to reach your ideal customer and to drive them to make a purchase. Whether you’re writing product descriptions, paid search ads, or blogs, every brand should have a specific person in mind that they want to reach. But how do you figure out who that person is? Intuition, research, and brand understanding are all important, but looking at the data behind your site visitors and shoppers is also key.
NetElixir Data Drives Consumer Insights
Our proprietary customer intelligence platform, LXRInsights, provides a wealth of information about your customers. This tool allows you to compare the shopping patterns of your high-value, mid-value, and low-value customers.
What makes a customer “high-value” typically is their loyalty. These customers make repeat purchases from your store and have a high lifetime value. LXRInsights also provides data about the time between purchases — key information for when you should be retargeting shoppers. Decreasing the time between purchases often increases the likelihood of creating a lifetime customer!
You can also use LXRInsights to track your top products by revenue and quantity. This information can help you plan what products to promote in advertising or feature on your homepage. You should also think about why this product — what is it that sets it apart from your competition?
LXRInsights also provides information about customers’ first touch points for your site (paid search, social, or organic) and what device they use to shop. These insights can be helpful when planning paid media campaigns, site design, and more.
NetElixir Research Supports Industry Learnings & Comparisons
Our data-driven team also does our own research into trends. Every year, NetElixir analyzes shopping data across several key e-commerce industries. We look at high-value customers’ shopping patterns during “typical” months versus the holiday season, then aggregate the data into our annual FACES report.
As you examine your business’s data, compare it to that of your industry with FACES. Consider what opportunities exist for refining or redefining your personas. Also consider whether you should be making any shifts during the holiday season to maximize sales.
Google Analytics Adds To Your Data Set
Google provides a wealth of knowledge about those browsing and purchasing from your e-commerce site. Some key areas that can help you with defining your ideal customers are demographic data like age and gender, as well as affinity and in-market audience information.
Age ranges and gender data paint a broad stroke for who is interested in your brand. Affinity markets show you other interests that your audience has, like “30-minute chefs” or “fashionistas.” In-market audiences are those that are likely to be shopping for a particular product, like home decor or apparel.
Extrapolating Data Into Customer Personas
By putting together all of this information, you can start to develop a sketch of your high-value customer persona. Consider the top revenue-generating age group and gender, and assume that that is the high-value customer identified by LXRInsights. What information can you interpret from layering this data?
If your high-value customer is a woman in her late 30s who is interested in 30-minute recipes and family life, you can interpret that to mean she’s likely busy with her career and her family. Give her an easy-to-remember name, like Mary the Mom. Then, start to define how she is a key client of yours and why. This will help you develop ads, onsite content, and even offline activities such as customer service training.
Let’s say you sell crafting supplies. Your top-selling product, per LXRInsights, is a block of wood that people make into a carving. The time between purchases averages 15 days. On Google Analytics, your top affinity group is Do-It-Yourselfers who are in-market for Personalized Gifts. Maybe you can define a persona that is someone who makes and sells custom carved wooden pieces: Wally the Woodworker.
Turning Personas Into Effective Content
Once you have your personas developed, the next step is determining their wants and needs, and expressing how your brand and products can help your customers.
Consider Mary the Mom. Based on her interests, you determined she’s very busy. Therefore, she’s probably in need of products that are convenient or make her life easier. In your content, share ways you can help her achieve this. Use language that shows you care and you’re here to help. Highlight the simplicity of your products. Think: “Meals ready to heat & eat!” or “Diaper bags that hold everything you need for a day out.” Mary would probably especially appreciate “Fast, free shipping” and “Easy returns,” too.
What about Wally the Woodworker? Based on his data, you know how often he’s shopping, so aim to send him an email about 13 days after his last purchase to encourage him to come back for his next material stock-up. You could consider retargeting him with different raw materials or list out some carving tools on the product page for the best-selling block of wood. You might even try developing an influencer program or sharing user-generated content on social media to highlight DIY products your users have completed with your products.
As you examine your data, think about any surprising or new data to see if there are any opportunities for your brand. For example, maybe you’ve always considered your brand to be female-dominated, but there’s a rising trend of men purchasing on your site. Perhaps you run a site that is primarily geared towards baby products, so you’ve always been writing ad copy and site content around “mom.” With this new data about men, you should think about revising your branding to be inclusive of all, like using “parents” instead.
Creating Impactful Content Using Customer Personas
Ultimately, identifying your customer personas helps you relate to them on a more personal, more human level. According to a survey by Sprout Social, 64% of consumers want brands to connect with them, and when they feel connected to a brand, 57% will increase their spending. Developing personas can help guide your copy towards being more personal, genuine, and honest, and drive those key feelings of connection and trust.
Instead of writing generic ads or blog posts, imagine you’re speaking directly to Mary or Wally. Consider what they would want to hear. Highlight the ways your product or service will benefit Mary and Wally based on their wants and needs. It’s frequently said that you should walk a mile in someone’s shoes to understand them — but developing a persona works just as well!
Future-proof your content creation strategy by pivoting to a strategy that uses insights to build real relationships with your customers. By connecting with them on a targeted basis, they will feel like the ads are personal, driving affinity and trust for your brand, building out a community, and ultimately growing your brand for years to come.
How NetElixir Can Help Your Brand
NetElixir is here to guide you through your entire e-commerce journey. We can help you gather and interpret data, introduce you to LXRInsights, work with you to develop your personas, and create targeted content for paid search, social media, your website and store, and blogs. Contact us at growth@netelixir.com and connect with our experts today!
