Defining Your Ideal Customer in eCommerce
There’s a lot of information out there on defining your ideal customer, but most of it isn’t written for you. It’s generally written for bloggers, business coaches, and service based businesses.
While an eCommerce business can benefit from many of the same best-practices, some of the information written in those articles just doesn’t apply to a products based business.
So, I’ve written this article just for you! It’s about how to define, find, and attract your ideal eCommerce customer.
[bctt tweet=”An ideal customer is someone who has a pain point you are able to solve, who is willing to pay you for that solution, and who becomes a loyal, raving fan of your business.” username=”@savvy_stilettos”]
But this is only part of the puzzle. What this definition doesn’t address, is identifying the customers you don’t want. This is just as important, because your ideal customers are not the ones who take up all your time, return more products than they buy, and complain about you on social media!
You want to attract people who are delighted to find you and genuinely appreciate what you have to offer. They’ll be more inclined to become loyal customers, make repeat purchases, and recommend you to their friends, which are vital elements to any growth strategy.
“You can’t hit a target you haven’t set”.
You may have heard that saying before. It sums up perfectly the importance of clearly defining your ideal customer, because any part of the sales and marketing process that “touches” the customer (which is pretty much EVERYTHING), will improve when you get crystal clear on your customer avatar.
To market a product properly, the first thing you must do is get clear on WHO your ideal customer is, where they are hanging out, what their challenges are…”
It makes sense, right?…
Ideal Customer vs. Customer Avatar… are they the same thing?
‘Buyer Persona’… ‘Marketing Persona’… ‘Customer Avatar’… ‘Target Market’… ‘Target Audience’ … these are all terms used interchangeably to describe the same thing. In a nutshell, it’s a fictional, generalised representation of the person that is most likely to buy from you.
After all, it’s a person that buys your products, so it pays to get clear on the characteristics of that person, so you can find and present them with a message that moves them to action.
By doing this exercise you will get a very clear picture of WHO would be the optimal purchaser of your products. So, your Customer Avatar will be a representation of your perfect customer. You need to consider things like:
- Their gender (male or female)
- Are they single or married?
- Do they have kids?
- How old are they?
- Where do they live?
- What is their profession?
- What social networks do they use?
- What books do they read?
- What TV shows do they watch?
- What is their worldview?
- What kind of car do they drive?
- What are their hobbies?
The process of creating a customer avatar for your business, will help you laser focus your efforts on finding customers who will make doing business FUN!
Do not go another week without having a well defined customer avatar. Set aside a little time and have a go at it, it really is an eye opening process (and your bank account will love you for it!!)
If you need more detailed help on where to gather this data, we have an additional resource to help you define your customer avatar – our Customer Avatar Course.
You will get ALL of the information that you need to find and fill your business with customers you love. The course includes easy to follow step by step videos, a workbook, templates and examples of eCommerce avatars with completed sheets that you can use to help define your “perfect customer”.
Register your interest in doing the course HERE.