How to Design a Persona-Centric Website Experience
Repost: Original article by: www.hubspot.com

Face it: your website isn’t just about you. After all, the main reason you even have one is to attract visitors that you can market to and later convert into leads and customers for your business, right? So shouldn’t you cater your website — and the experiences you provide there — to those very visitors? When people land on your website, they usually ask themselves, “What’s in it for me?” And as a marketer, you need to be able to deliver an experience that makes it clear to those visitors exactly what’s in it for them, and why they should care.

That’s why it’s so crucial to craft your website’s design, content, and experience with your business’ buyer personas in mind. In fact, Gleanster research identifies a direct correlation between the amount of time a prospect spends on a company website engaging with relevant content and the likelihood that those interactions will lead to a sale. And according to survey data captured for the Q1 2012 Gleansight benchmark report Web Content Management, a majority of companies within the B2B realm are investing in technologies, capabilities, and resources to bring the concept of web content personalization to life, making it obvious that businesses are realizing that a "one-size-fits-all" approach is less effective than one that provides content tailored to specific segments of site visitors.

Here, we’ll discuss how to design your website in a way that puts your buyer personas first, amplifying the effects of your already stellar inbound marketing.

The Importance of Buyer Personas in Website Design

Before you embark on a website redesign, one of the first things you should consider is your business’ buyer personas (sometimes also referred to as ‘customer personas’ or ‘marketing personas’). Buyer personas are the result of slicing your target audience into individual groups of people. These people are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

For instance, if you’re a marketing manager for a hotel that is looking to bring in new business, you might target five distinct buyer personas: an independent business traveler, a corporate travel manager, an event planner, a vacationing family, and a couple planning their wedding reception. If you think about it, all of these distinct personas have very different interests and needs. A website approach that speaks to these needs in aggregate, or in general, will fall short in its ability to answer the "What’s in it for me?" question specific to each individual buyer persona. However, a website approach that directly addresses the particular needs of each individual persona will make the answer to "What’s in it for me?" clearer and more personalized, contributing to a much more successful website.

So if you haven’t already, invest the time into identifying your business’ different buyer personas. Depending on your business, you could have as few as 1 or 2, or as many as 10-20! Consider the following when building your buyer personas, and for even more in-depth information on the topic, check out this checklist of questions to ask when developing buyer personas:

• Segment by Demographics: Start developing personas by researching your existing customer base to identify the most common buyers for your products and services. You may have several different types of buyers, so give each one a detailed description, including name, job title or role, industry or company info, and demographic info.
• Identify Their Needs: What are the biggest problems they are trying to solve? What do they need most? What information are they typically searching for? What trends are influencing their business or personal success?
• Develop Behavior-Based Profiles: What do they do online? Are they active on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks? What kind of search terms do they use? What kind of information do they tend to consume online? Which of your products do they spend the most time researching? How do they use those products?

Spending the time to clearly identify your business’ buyer personas is well worth it, as this information will also be helpful as you create content to fuel your efforts in other marketing channels such as social media, email marketing, and lead nurturing. When executing your various marketing campaigns, you’ll need to adapt the messaging of your content to fit the needs of your different buyer personas.

How to Design Your Website for Your Buyer Personas

Now that you’ve got a clear understanding of your business’ various buyer personas and what makes them tick, you can start to cater your website experience to the interests of these different customer segments.

Include Choose Your Own Adventure-Style Links on Your Homepage

That’s right; choosing your own adventure isn’t just great reading for preteens. Consider including links on your homepage or in your website’s navigation that allow visitors to self-select who they are to receive the most relevant content and website experience possible. This eliminates any question of what the site visitor should do next, and it allows you to more easily channel your visitors and expose them to certain content on your website, giving you more control over their actions.

In the example below, which is a screenshot of the HubSpot homepage from early 2011, we asked new visitors to self-select their persona choosing from HubSpot’s two main buyer personas — business owners and marketing professionals. Clicking one led the site visitor to a landing page with content tailored to that persona’s specific interests and needs.

Create a Customized Page for Each Persona

So what should those ‘choose your own adventure’ links on your homepage and/or in your website’s navigation lead to? One great option you have is to create a customized page for each of your buyer personas. Creating these pages will allow you to feature targeted language, messaging, and video content, as well as provide useful links to targeted content, offers, product pages (we’ll discuss this more later), etc. that appeal just to that particular segment or buyer persona. So if we continued with our hotel example in the beginning of this post, you could create a page for each of those separate personas: independent business travelers, corporate travel managers, event planners, vacationing families, and couples planning their wedding reception.

Create Targeted Landing Pages & Content for Each Persona

To truly cater your website to your various marketing personas, you’ll need to take things a step further by creating targeted landing pages — and content to go with them — for each persona. This means everything from blog posts to more premium offers like ebooks, webinars, product demos, etc. You can use this content as links within your individual persona pages, your website’s general resource center (we’ll get to that soon), and in lead nurturing campaigns catered to those particular personas. HubSpot, for example, recently released its State of the Online Services Industry Report, which is tailored to potential partners of HubSpot, another one of HubSpot’s personas.

The good news is, if you already have content and offers that suit a more general audience, you don’t have to start from scratch. Crafting content and offers — and building landing pages to house those offers — can more easily be done by modifying the generally targeted content you have to address the specific needs of your different segments. When tweaking your content for each persona, you’ll want to look for ways to cater to the persona’s individual needs, problems, and interests; adjust formatting, depth, and length; modify language and tone; and incorporate industry/persona-specific examples. For a more in-depth explanation of how this can be done, check out this blog article, which is completely dedicated to explaining how to tailor your content to suit individual personas.

Identify Web Page Content by Persona

While you may have decided it’s a great idea to create dedicated, persona-based pages to aggregate all of your persona-targeted content and offers, you should also take measures to make the rest of your website persona-friendly. What if your personas never decide to ‘choose their own adventures’ or self-identify using your helpful homepage or navigation links? Or perhaps they came in to your blog through search, completely missing their opportunity to self-identify? They may just end up browsing through your website and missing your beautifully targeted persona pages! If this happens, you’ll want to put a few safeguards in place to make sure that you can still deliver relevant content and experiences to those site visitors.

1. Separate Content in Resource Centers: If you already have a general content repository to aggregate all your awesome ebooks, webinars, and other offers, give that portion of your website a persona-driven facelift. Create categories of content for each of your personas in addition to the general content you provide, and bucket that persona-based content under those categories for visitors to sort through.
   
2. Segment Blog Content Using Categories/Tags: As you create persona-focused blog content, come up with a clear tagging system that will allow different personas to identify which of the content you’ve published is specifically applicable to them. Then display these persona tags clearly on your blog so your blog readers can self-identify and view content catered only to their interests.
   
3. Break Out Product Content: Chances are, if you sell to a number of different buyer personas, your sales team probably positions the products/services you sell differently to each persona (and if you’re not sure — talk to them!). If you realize your sales team is using unique sales angles to sell your various products to each persona, the products pages of your website would probably also lend themselves to a more persona-driven treatment. Using the same methodology we discussed earlier to modify your other content to suit individual personas, you can do the same to your product pages, creating product pages that more accurately speak to the needs of the personas you’re selling to. Then you can organize your product pages similar to the way you organized your ‘choose your own adventure’ homepage, funneling visitors into specific product pages depending on their persona.
   
4. Divide Case Study Content: Do you publish customer case studies? Divide them by persona to enable prospects to easily find case studies that they can relate to. On HubSpot’s case studies page, for example, we use a tagging system similar to the way you’d tag a blog to denote case studies by various industries so personas can identify with their particular industry and view the most appropriate case studies for them.
   

Tailor Individual Calls-to-Action (CTAs) to Each Persona

Last, but certainly not least, you have your CTAs. To optimize your website design for lead generation, you need to put some thought into conversion. Create call-to-action buttons that correlate with your persona-targeted offers, and include them on the pages of your website that are dedicated to those personas.

Referring back to our hotel example, if you created a persona-driven product page for your hotel’s event rental space, create a persona-targeted CTA for your free in-person event space consultation, and place it on that page. If you created a free tip sheet about "The 10 Best Restaurants in the Area" geared toward the business traveler, another one of your hotel’s personas, create a CTA for it and place it on the persona pages you created for business travelers. When creating your CTA buttons, think about the CTA copy, design, and imagery that will resonate best with that particular persona — and don’t be afraid to do some A/B testing to help you figure this out. For a deeper dive into creating effective calls-to-action, reference this handy guide.

In what other ways can you design your website to be more persona-friendly?

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Case Study: How to Breathe New Life into Your Tired Old Blog
Repost: Original article by: www.copyblogger.com

Remember how fun it was when you first started your blog?

Writing great posts was effortless, and connecting with your audience was a pleasure.

In a classic scene in the movie Drop Dead Fred, Phoebe Cates and her imaginary friend Fred build a colossal mud pie on the dining room table.

They revel in the messy joy of creation and the fact that it’s going to infuriate her mother (aka the “Mega Beast”).

Starting a blog is like making that massive mud pie. It’s a major undertaking, yes, but an exciting one. Everything is fun and interesting. Your creativity is soaring and you predict your blog will astound and awe the online world.

Unfortunately, we creative people get bored easily and sometimes that new-blog luster wears off. Time passes, and you get sick of writing about that topic you used to love.

You move on, and now you want to write about something totally different. So what do you do about your old blog?

Well, you have three options:

1. Take down the old blog and start over with something new
2. Sell the old blog to someone who will give it the love and attention you once did
3. Reposition and revive the old blog

If you’ve put years of work into a blog, you may want to give option three some serious consideration. You can leverage that existing content and your site quality to build something new and amazing.

Your content legacy

If you’ve been online for a long time, you have a content legacy attached to your name.

Google knows what you’ve been up to. The content you have posted to your blog is part of your online history.

Completely erasing your content legacy and starting over is daunting. When faced with this problem, people often can’t decide what to do, so they do nothing at all and let the blog languish.

That was my approach for quite a while. People who do a Google search on my name probably think I have some sort of multiple personality disorder.

I used to write a lot of articles about how to use computers. Until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

My most popular computer-related site, Computor Companion, was a multi-author site I started as an archive for a print magazine that I published starting in 1999.

Although we stopped printing the magazine in 2001, we continued to publish online issues of the magazine through 2009. Needless to say, after publishing for 10 years, the site was large. With hundreds of articles and millions of visitors, Computor Companion was a content Mega Beast.

In fact, even after completely ignoring the site for more than two years, I still get feedback on the articles almost daily and remain in contact with many of the authors.

I never could let Computor Companion go. So many memories and online friendships are associated with it, I couldn’t part with the site.

Up until recently, I couldn’t figure out what to do with it either. After the Google Panda update, the traffic started falling off because Google noticed that the site hadn’t been updated in a while.

Clearly, I needed to do something.

Tear it apart and build it back up

In Drop Dead Fred, during the last moments of that mud pie scene, Fred breaks open a Jack in the Box toy and plops Jack’s head on top of the messy creation.

He says, “You see, when something’s not working right, the best thing is to tear it apart to make it better.”

If you want to reposition an existing blog, that’s what you have to do too. You tear it apart and build it back up.

That’s exactly what I did to relaunch Computor Companion.

Find a new angle

Determining a workable way to reposition your blog is arguably the hardest step. You can salvage most of the content if you don’t opt to go in a completely different direction. (If you absolutely can’t stand the topic at all, refer to Option 1 above and just start a new blog.)

The idea of repositioning Computor Companion had been on my mind for months before I finally arrived at a new slant that would work. I kept dwelling on the old tagline, which was “How to use computers effectively.” But the idea of doing technical writing or editing was unappealing at best. (Read: not going to happen.)

To arrive at the new direction, I looked at the readers’ problems differently. Most of my clients and many Computor Companion readers have used the information for business purposes. Then the new tagline hit me: Smart Ideas and Advice to Grow Your Business with Technology.

I could write (and edit) articles about small business. Almost everyone uses computers in business, so the existing articles could still work within the new framework. But the software focus could be deemphasized in future content.

To find a new angle for your blog, ask yourself: What problems — other than my central topic — does my content solve for readers?

Set new goals

Coming up with a new idea is great, but implementation can be challenging. If you’re going to go to all the work of revamping a blog, you should think about why you want to do it.

Think about your goals for the site and whether all the work will be worth it. In our case, our goals were to:

• Expand our content marketing into a different area
• Make money from advertising initially and products in the future
• Capture leads from people interested in small business issues

Our goals affected how we redesigned and rebranded the site. Think about what you want your blog to do for your business before you embark on any changes.

Update the design

Obviously, a site that hadn’t been updated since 2009 needed some design attention. I didn’t want to completely throw away the old design, so the site will keep a similar color scheme.

Redesigning the site was relatively simple. For a blog, you can easily replace the theme to totally change the look. It’s amazing what a few color changes and a new header can do.

In our case, I created a new logo that is reminiscent of the old site/magazine. We also added more white space and I rewrote all the static pages (About, Home, etc.) to reflect the new direction. I came up with an idea for an autoresponder and we added sign-up forms to capture email addresses.

Reorganize the content

Our next trick was to recategorize all the existing content, so it would make sense going forward. In the prior incarnation, the site focused on how to use software, so that’s how the articles were organized.

Now, with a small business focus, the articles are categorized into subject areas like Getting Clients, Developing Your Business, and Productivity. We deleted a few articles entirely and imported a few articles from another old site we were shutting down. At this point, some of the categories don’t have many articles, but there’s a lot of room for growth.

The key to setting up categories is to think about how you want people to find the content. We had the technical expertise to dig into the databases and reassign categories. If you don’t have a resident geek, you may need to resign yourself to some rather tedious work reorganizing your content.

Launch!

Once we had the new site design in place and the autoresponder set up, we launched. When you launch a blog, it’s easy to get mired down in perfectionism, but the problem is worse when you’re retrofitting an existing site.

You’ll undoubtedly have to compromise on a few issues. In our case, some articles aren’t perfectly categorized and there are a couple of articles we probably should have deleted, but didn’t because of the author.

At this point, Computor Companion isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than it was. We have a new platform for great content that I can enjoy writing and editing going forward.

The best part is that I have a site that’s no longer dragging me down. The prospect of adding new articles doesn’t scare or depress me.

As Fred would say, “I’m not afraid of the Mega Beast!”

How about you?

Ever take a blog or a website all the way to the ground and build it back up again? Ever think about doing it with your current site?

Let us know in the comments.

» Read the Original and Complete Article

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Why Do Email Designs Break?

Repost: Original article by: www.litmus.com

A guide for when email rendering goes wild

Ever wondered why emails break? Most of the time, we chalk rendering issues up to poor HTML and CSS support from email clients. Turns out they’re not always the bad guys!

Stop scratching your head every time an email doesn’t look quite like it should, and reference this handy guide to all the ways email rendering can go wrong.

Email Testing Tools

Email rendering can still go wrong, even armed with this knowledge. Make a habit of testing every message you send across major email clients before sending. Litmus offers a 7-day email testing trial on all new subscriptions!

Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view.

» Read the Original and Complete Article

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The best time to send email so it will get read

Repost: Original article by: www.cbsnews.com

(MoneyWatch) For the past 18 months or so, I’ve been sending a monthly email out to a list of a few thousand people (who voluntarily gave me their addresses!) My open rate is somewhere between 35 percent and 44 percent.

This past month, I had a realization: the highest open rates tended to occur during the months that I sent the email on a Sunday afternoon.

This did not seem intuitive to me. Indeed, I’d actually avoided sending the email on weekends because I thought it would lower the open rate. Most of us try to be places other than our desks on Sundays, and doing things that don’t involve email.

The 7 habits of highly effective emailers

But after talking with Alex Moore, CEO of Baydin, an email management service, I started to think about what was going on. Moore told me that emails sent from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. are about three times more likely to be opened than emails sent at 4 p.m.

Many of us know that we should "never check email in the morning" (to quote the title of Julie Morgenstern’s excellent book). Yet we do. We show up at our workplaces, grab our coffee, and start pecking away at our inboxes, starting with the first unopened emails — those sent at 6 a.m. or so. Any email sent then is "toward the top of the pile," says Moore, so it gets read.

By the end of the day, though, any given email gets buried in an avalanche of other emails. People are triaging and trying to get out the door and anything marginal or not related to the task at hand will just get deleted or ignored. That’s why morning emails work so well.

Which makes sense — but doesn’t explain what I was finding. Why was Sunday afternoon working so well for me?

It turns out that in the smartphone era, many people do check email on Sundays. Any resolve to stay out of the inbox ends with Saturday. People are done partying. Sitting in the bleachers at a soccer game, or waiting for a game to come on, or puttering around the house, they’re somewhat bored, and willing to do something that seems semi-productive. Since not too many messages come in on Sunday, yours might get read. And as for people who don’t check email on Sunday? A 4 p.m. Sunday email looks a lot like a 6 a.m. Monday email from that perspective. They’re both at the top of the pile.

So if you want an email to get read, send it Sunday afternoon or early in the morning.

» Read the Original and Complete Article

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