Personas

Personas are a transparent and easily manageable way of segmenting visitors of your websites. Using the Personas application, you can define the typical visitor groups of your sites. Once you have defined personas, the system assigns visitors to the persona they fit the best. This is done based on data about the visitors and their behavior on the sites. You can use personas throughout the whole system (pages, emails, macros) to display different content to each persona that you have defined.

Examples of segmenting site visitors into personas

The following are rough examples of personas in two businesses. Ideally, these would be based on research and would also contain additional information.

Hospital website

• Patient – looking for information about the hospital. Such as pricing of services, admission requirements or meals that are served on that day.
• Visitor of another patient – may be looking for information such as visiting hours, parking information or information on getting around the hospital.
• Foreigner – patients and potential patients not participating in the health insurance system provided in the country may require special information.

E-commerce website selling computer hardware

• Budget buyer – looking for the best bargains on the site and what is usually the low-end specification version of the currently available hardware.
• Early adopter – looking for the latest gadgets and pieces of hardware. Willing to invest substantially more even into unproven products.
• Mid-market buyer – usually looking for the best price / performance ratio. Buying products that do not lose value as quickly as high end products.
• Community enthusiast– a visitor who often aids other in product comments, or who writes reviews for other visitors of the website.

Personas should ideally be defined based on the outcomes of your market research to reflect how people fitting these personas really work. Find more information in Defining personas.

Displaying content to Personas

Developers can prepare personalized content displayed based on personas. See:

• Content personalization
• Personalizing widgets