In the retail industry, the long-time adage “content is king” rings hollow without personalization leveraged on retail personas. Personalization marketing based on personas has real advantages for retailers: it can reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 50%, increase marketing ROI by 30%, and lift revenues by 40%.

Your business can deliver a variety of communications and campaigns, but unless they’re personalized, they’re less likely to speak to your customers and increase engagement and conversion rates. Miss the mark, however, and they are gone.

In fact, 71% of consumers reported that they expect personalized experiences, and 76% are frustrated when they don’t get it. It’s imperative to avoid poorly targeted, irrelevant communications. The first step to doing this is to leverage your customer data and group customers with similar behaviors and needs – also known as personas.

Benefits of Personas: The personal Touch

Offering personalized experiences across the shopper journey brings many benefits to retailers.

To name a few, personas help retailers obtain valuable information from customers, allowing them to create unique, personalized offers for effective upsell, cross-sell and customer retention. With the right solution, brands can minimize the time needed for sophisticated audience segmentation and timely engagement, while building the foundation to deliver relevant, effective campaigns.

Difference between Personas and Segments

Note that the difference between personas and segments is subtle. Many brands still find it difficult to differentiate between these two terms.

Segments are primarily used to help determine whether a brand or product is attractive to certain groups in the marketplace, based on demographics, purchase patterns, similar traits and attributes. They’re great for helping shape your brand’s messaging, content strategy, and product targeting.

A persona is a subset of customer segments. It is, on the other hand, a semi-fictional representation of that segment based on their behavior and influence. It allows your brand to have true insights into the psychological and emotional wants and needs of their audiences and help them personalize offers accordingly.

Let’s explore retail personas using two examples below.