The Significance of Buyer Persona in Email Marketing

Email marketing still works like a charm in most domains, playing a major role in today’s business scenarios. But things are always evolving, which is why just sending some emails out to people doesn’t guarantee you will see any results.

In fact, without sorting out who gets to see your message and at which stage of the buyer journey, you will most likely end up in the Spam folder.

The trick to creating the best emails list is to get familiar with the notion of buyer persona and segmenting, personalizing and automating your email communication and outreach strategy accordingly.

A buyer persona is basically your ideal customer. It’s a group of people having similar traits, who are looking for services/products that you offer and after engaging with your offer, content, or anything that they lay their hands on, would be willing to make a purchase.

Creating the buyer persona for your business is key to tailoring your marketing strategy and connecting with the right audience at the right time with the right value, allowing you to cater to their needs and solve their problems effectively.

Below we have mentioned 5 ways how building a great buyer persona will help sharpen you and your team’s emailing efforts and generate better results form the medium:

Create an effective email marketing strategy

If you have a clear profile for your ideal client–a good buyer persona–you’ll find it easier to scout, study and comprehend their problems and motivations.

A better understanding of their pain points will let you frame email content that addresses their issues in an effective way.

With clear buyer-persona, you can frame an email marketing strategy that builds trust and increases brand recall by focusing on writing a relatable and engaging email copy for your email campaigns, which help your targeted recipients derive value faster.

Before creating an email marketing strategy, every email marketer needs to know how an email marketing funnel works because you should have a clear idea that in which stage of the funnel your recipient or prospect is

Talk about your core values that the targeted buyer persona can relate to the most and how those values contribute to the buyer persona’s goals.

Also, it would help you better program your email touch points, ensuring that you initiate a value-adding conversion at a time and point in the customer journey wherein the potential customer would be willing to have the targeted value-exchange.

Better alignment of email campaigns with the buyer’s journey.

For increasing your chances of converting a visitor into a buyer, you need to understand their journey from their point of view.

The buyer’s journey is the process potential buyers go through while they get in contact, measure and then eventually purchase your product or service. There are many blogs out there who will talk about a 5 or 6-stage buyer’s journey, but the whole thing can be summarised into noticing, considering, and purchasing.

• In the noticing or awareness part, a buyer finds out about his problem and starts looking out for solutions. He is aware of it, therefore they need to look out for ways to overcome their needs.
• From here, the buyer goes into consideration, researching his options. For example, if he’s looking for new lightbulbs, he will research into those and he’ll make sure he’s getting the best solution for his money.
• Finally, the purchasing part is the most important one, because this is where you want your buyer to take action in your favor. At this stage, a potential buyer will take everything into account, including shipping, reviews, etc. while narrowing down between the options shortlisted during the consideration stage.

Having a well-defined buyers persona will help you frame value adding emails for customers in each stage of the buying journey and get them to follow your call to action.

It will also enable you to create automated drip email campaigns where you can set trigger events that send emails to potential buyers who are at a certain stage of their buying process and increase the scale and effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

Frame and send personalized email copy that has high open rates

In the era of fast-paced email marketing campaigns, the difference between a successful and a bad campaign stands in the personalization. Having apt knowledge of your buyers will help you personalize and send out great email copy which a given buyer persona can relate to, at a specific stage of the buyer’s journey. This in return will award you with higher opening rates and, of course, more customers. Having an exact idea of stages of the buyer’s journey will help you understand them in detail.

Below we have covered some key pointers that one should keep in mind while framing and personalizing email copies at the three stages of a buyer’s journey:
1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Purchase

Awareness Stage:

In the awareness stage, a buyer should get aware of his problem and how a solution to their problem exists. It is your first point of contact with the buyer, so make sure you write an introduction to the solution that you’re providing, using elements that your targeted buyer persona finds relateable.

Email Type: Soft Promotion
An email that articulates your expertise in the field and your ability to give a solution to their problem with some basic information about the product or service would be apt to engage a targeted prospect at this stage. The recipient is discovering his problem and might find your emails spammy if you promote too much of your features.

For example, if you are selling a lawn mover then at this stage don’t talk about the mover instead talk about the prospects field and gain trust.

Consideration Stage:

In the Consideration stage, the buyer would be considering between different options that would help them solve their problem. While they are narrowing it down, they want to know what added advantage they have by using your product over any other. You need to answer the question, “Why should I choose you?” at this stage of your buyer persona journey.

Email Type: Hard Promotion (Relatively)

You need to communicate with them regarding the points of differentiation that gives them added value as well as makes them trust your partnership. You can also mention the specifications and features of your product. At this stage, they are carefully listening to everything that you say in order to consider your product over any other. Following up in this stage gives your buyer a motivational push.

Purchase Stage:

Purchase Stage: At this stage, your customer is already convinced that they want to buy your product. Your mission is to get the customer comfortable using your product. This stage is where your buyer will decide whether to become a loyal customer or shift to your competitors. It is crucial to make them delighted and glad that they chose you.

Email Type: Deliver Delight
In this stage, you need to communicate with them regarding the payment process, the outline of onboarding and know-how that provides them with a quick and easy win at first. Also, you need to solve any query regarding the product/service that they might have. This would leave a long-lasting impression on your clients and help you retain them for a longer period of time.

There are few to-dos that you need to make sure of regardless of what stage your buyer persona is at. These factors will work as your go-to guide for writing an effective email. They are as follows:

Start with a killer subject line, explaining why people are left behind or are at a disadvantage without your product. Really make them think about the line you put as a subject because if they take 3 seconds to think about it, chances are they’ll eventually click on it.

Once they’re in, let them have a great copy to read and enjoy. Take your time and do your research well and, with a great buyer’s persona at hand, write an email that your targeted persona can relate to and set specific motivational triggers to induce conversions.

If you have a segmented email outreach list which is long then it is better to send a personalized mass email campaign using it to increase productivity keeping the required personal touch intact.

Present an irresistible offer and ensure they follow CTA

Once you know your buyer’s persona, it should be easy for you to come up with an offer they can’t refuse. All you need to do is answer the question “what is it that a given persona values the most?” and use your creativity to add it as a call to action to your email message. You need to know if your target audience will be interested in signing up for a free trial of the product or would readily buy it if given a customized offer.

Lead them to a landing page that has relevant persuasion architecture

Now that you’ve done all this hard work of knowing and framing the buyer personas, following them through the three phases of buyers journey and eventually have them click on your email’s call-to-action button, the last and most important step is to create a great landing page with a relevant, persuasive architecture for them.

Email marketing has a simple objective: to drive engagement, conversions, and sales. Create a landing page specifically designed for the people who would come on it from your email campaign.

Have relatable elements and engage them using motivational triggers that induce them to follow the intended action. This extra level of care, combined with relevant data and making the prospect feel he’s still in the same story from the beginning, will drastically increase your chances of turning them into clients.

Stories sell extremely well, which is why having a great story on your landing page that the incoming audience from your email campaign can relate to, is crucial for a successful email marketing program.

Doing your homework right can stand between you and the success of your email marketing efforts, so double check everything you think you’re right about before sending out the first email. It’ll all pay out in the end!