So, what can you learn about your visitors that will help you encourage them to “add to cart” and eventually make a purchase? To accomplish the difficult task of converting more visitors into customers, you need to consider many aspects regarding your visitors:
What are your visitors’ general buying patterns?
What trigger words will have the most impact on your visitors?
Can visitors find the information they are looking for to make a purchase decision right away?
How do visitors view your website design? Does your design instill confidence in visitors?
Which website elements persuade visitors to remain on the site, and why?
Which website elements cause visitors to exit, and why?
Which of your competitors are your visitors likely to consider (maybe a brick-and-mortar store or a strong competing website), and why?
The goal of asking yourself these questions is to see your website from your visitors’ vantage point. By doing so, you will start to understand what they are thinking, what objections they have, and how they will navigate and browse through your site.
However, we often find that CEOs, VPs, and even IT teams impose their own perceptions of how they think visitors feel about or view their website, even if the visitors’ answers to these questions differ from their own.
Consider how difficult it is to buy gifts for close friends or relatives. You try to put yourself in their shoes and imagine what they would like to receive. But how many times do we make the mistake of purchasing gifts we think they will enjoy? And to our dismay, very often we are wrong. What about an entire website and buying experience for millions of people very far removed from you? How do you create something that will capture their interest?
This is where personas become essential. Creating personas for your website was made popular by Alan Cooper, an advocate for interactive design and author of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. The process was later adopted by many large user-centered design and development companies. Cooper writes in his book:
Marketing professionals will be instantly familiar with the process of persona development, as it is very similar to what they do in the market definition phase. The main difference between marketing personas and design personas is that the former are based on demographics and distribution channels, whereas the latter are based purely on users. The two are not the same, and don’t serve the same purpose. The marketing personas shed light on the sales process, whereas the design personas shed light on the development process.[20]