Using a combination of the methods in the preceding list should help you create a good demographic profile of your target customers. A simple demographic profile will look something like this:
White, college-educated males, ages 35 to 45, with annual household income between $80,000 and $100,000. Married with children, live in the suburbs.
Behavioral profiles can be created to segment customers on your website, however, the subject is beyond the scope of this book. For this information, we recommend that you refer to your website analytics and customer database to segment customers based on their purchasing and browsing habits. A simple behavioral profile will look something like this:
Customers who place an order with the website once every 10 weeks, who visit the site once every week, and whose last order was eight weeks ago.
Notice that the demographic profile focuses on customer characteristics and the behavioral profile focuses on how a customer acts on your website. This is an important distinction. Demographic profiles are valuable in defining market segments and how your product or service helps each segment. And although we cannot discount the value of demographic profiles, they are not as effective in describing how a customer will interact with your website as behavioral profiles. Jim Novo, the leading analytics expert, sums this up by stating:
Customer behavior is a much stronger predictor of your future relationship with a customer than demographic information ever will be. You have to look at the data, the record of their behavior, and it will tell you things. It will tell you “I’m not satisfied.” It will tell you “I want to buy more, give me a push.” It will tell you “I think your content is boring.”[30]
Field and usability studies are great for providing insight regarding how customers and visitors interact with your website.
Field studies are widely recognized in the marketing world as opportunities to observe buyers in their natural buying states. Offline studies require experts to observe buyers at a department store or the local grocery store to gauge how various types of visitors interact with the overall store layout, promotions, products, and customer reps. In the online world, we conduct field tests in a neutral location (library, coffee shop, or often a lab) to observe users’ overall browsing behavior as well as their interaction and first impression of the site in question. We generally try to conduct field studies with 10 to 15 people who fall into the general description of the market. Field studies encourage little to no intrusion. We may direct users to begin looking at a site, but then they are on their own. If they decide to navigate or remain on the site, the expert will monitor every eye and mouse movement, click, and action taken. The users in these studies must match the overall marketing data (demographic) of the site.
Usability studies, on the other hand, are conducted with a scripted number of tasks to complete. Users are instructed to vocalize the reason behind every mouse move, every click, and every impression they have. Their task is to imagine a scenario (putting themselves in the shoes of potential buyers of the product) and complete the task at hand. The entire experience is recorded with commentary and very often includes the users’ facial expressions. The users in these studies must match the overall marketing data (demographic) of the site.
An example of a usability study looks like this:
You are shopping for a unique Christmas gift for your eccentric daughter. She’s 15 and is very difficult to please. She appreciates art, and likes items that are custom-made so that nobody has anything like it. You stumble upon a site that sells customizable bed sets and decide to take a look around.
At this point, you have set up the user to identify herself with this mother (she should already match the general demographics of the market, which probably includes a mother). The user is then given a number of tasks to complete. The less detail you give, the more room you give for the user to behave according to her intuitions. If you give her specific instructions, such as identifying exactly where to click next, you are restricting her regular online behavior and skewing the test. Be as ambiguous as possible. Give her the task, but leave much up to her perceptions.
Conducting usability studies for ecommerce websites helps identify weak areas on the site and creates scenarios around them to monitor why users were unable or hesitated to continue. We like to conduct pre-persona studies whereby participants are matched with marketing data, and post-persona development whereby we locate more exact matches to our personas. It’s important to locate users who have never conducted usability studies before; otherwise, the results may not be accurate since the user would know what to anticipate, and what to say.