Food for thought: Using Personas in segmentation and testing

At Bienalto, we do a lot of experience architecture work. One of the main aspects of this work is the development of Personas – descriptors of different user types that act as a beacon to remind the designers exactly who they are designing for.

What if these Personas could be used beyond the experience architecture phase, and into the website optimisation and testing phases?

Just to be clear, using Personas in web analytics is not a common practice. But here at Bienalto, we like to push the boundaries and test new ideas so that our clients are getting the best services possible.

Before we look at the possibilities, let’s see how Personas are developed.

Creating a Persona

The first step is the contextual inquiry, whereby an experience architect visits a website user in their workplace or home, to observe them in their ‘natural environment’. A short interview accompanies this observation of them using the web, and profiles are created for each user.

From here, groupings of different user types are compiled – for example, James might be grouped with those who use a Dell to search the web, never use Facebook, don’t like faceted search, and so on. This creates your Personas.

The reason why Personas are so important is that traditional audience segments provided by the marketing department aren’t rich enough – or they segment in ways that don’t take into account online variables.

Putting Personas to long-term use

Current practice sees Personas gathering dust on the shelf once the experience architecture and design stages are complete.

But there is a longer life for them. They can – and should – become an integral component of your online marketing campaigns, as well as ongoing website management and optimisation activities.

For example, for site optimisation, instead of relying on the traditional segments, you can use your Personas to add a new layer of richness to the process. In doing so, you will start to achieve better results against web goals such as conversions.

Econsultancy ‘Conversion Report’: work needs to be done

A recent report released by Econsultancy shows that 39% of companies are not happy with their website’s conversion rates. Given that conversions – be it sales, sign-ups, downloads, video views or others – are the ultimate goals of most corporate sites, improving the conversion rate is a top priority for web owners.

Significantly, the report found that segmentation improves conversion, with those companies that used more segments enjoying higher conversion rates than those who use fewer segments.

The main types of segmentation carried out were: demographic (39%) geographic (36%) and behavioural (33%).

We believe that, by using Personas to create more targeted segments, organisations will start to see better results in their conversions. Segments become richer, tailored messages become more meaningful, and customers feel like they’re really being spoken to.

What do you think? Are Personas the new black when it comes to segmentation and site optimisation?

Speak to Bienalto about the power of Personas
Read more findings from the Econsultancy conversion report