Customer personas
Who is our customer? A simple question really, but even though I’d been working for USCutter for over 8 years, there seemed to be no universal answer to that question. If you asked 5 people about our customer, you’d get 5 different answers. I wanted to find a way to create a more standardized picture of who our customers were, to help our (marketing) department empathize and speak more personally to that customer. You can view photos in the gallery below, or scroll down to read more about the methodology for this project.
Methodology & Research
After pitching the idea to a co-worker, together we developed a standardized methodology of analyzing customer purchase history. We then selected a sample of just over 100 customer accounts from March 2018 (our busiest sales month thus far). My vision for this project involved a cooperated effort from the entire marketing team of 6 people, so we divided the sample up and gave each person 10-15 accounts to analyze in depth. We looked at a mix of both quantitative and qualitative data.; everything from a customer’s geographic region, AOV (average order value), lifetime value, what brands of material they were buying, if they were running a business, what kind of business they were running, etc. From there, a co-worker and I looked for patterns in this data and grouped customer accounts together. Based on these patterns, 4 distinct customer segments emerged. We labeled these 4 segments: crafters, in-house marketers, small businesses, and large businesses, and put together an in-depth report to further define and quantify each customer segment. Within each customer segment, we created 2-3 customer personas and gave them names and faces to further humanize the data.
Metrics and statistics are important, but there’s something very powerful about giving a face and name to the data. Our customers aren’t numbers after all, but living, breathing, human beings. I strongly believe that being able to understand and connect to their likes, dislikes, pain points, and motivations is key to a business’s long term success.