• home
• resources
• whitepapers
• building subscriber personas

What are Subscriber Personas?

The use of personas in marketing isn't new. Marketers have used personas to figure out how people browse and navigate websites to boost the relevancy of their sites for some time now. Email marketers who are trying to increase the relevancy of their email campaigns can use this same approach to figure out who their typical subscribers are, what they want, and why they behave the way they do. And, using that information, they can build email campaigns that meet their subscribers' requirements, not their own.

Personas are specific, yet imaginary, examples of your typical subscribers that exemplify the different types of your target audience members. They take into account precise characteristics, attitudes, behaviors, needs, influences, and goals while ignoring generic stereotypes and clichés that can sabotage your understanding of each persona. Even though they're made up, they are incredibly powerful as they allow you to communicate more efficiently and effectively with your audience.

Personas give you the ability to target your audience beyond simple profiling attributes, such as location or occupation, without having to mine your data or use dynamic content to communicate with your subscribers individually. Typical segmentation allows you to build emails that speak to subscribers in a one-to-many scenario. Dynamic content, on the other hand, is so targeted that the emails are individualized for an exact, one-to-one approach. Using personas, you can create emails that speak to audience members in a one-to-few circumstance. It increases the relevancy of your campaigns and the engagement levels of your audience because you can build variable messages without the difficulty and complexity of dynamic content campaigns.