Everyone who has been involved in conversion optimization exercises, knows what personas are. Traditionally, in conversion marketing, we don’t look at the same kind of personas like for instance in web development.

In usability and design we create personas in function of potential visitor profiles and scenarios, among many other things, for navigation and website structure purposes. In conversion marketing, however, we focus more on representations of prospects and customers or buyer personas. Although obviously one can define a customer in a very broad sense.

Personas, those prototypes we create to represent our customers, in function of conversion optimization exercises, are not the same as target groups or segments.

Nevertheless, segmenting is one of the most common ways to improve conversion in marketing tactics such as email marketing.

In practice, we often see that the way conversion optimization is done, largely depends on the specific activity such as SEO, email, social media, content marketing etc. And often buyer personas are even not used since they traditionally tend to be defined in quite a broad way.

In a cross-channel and customer-centric marketing reality it is a necessity to have common goals, metrics, key performance indicators and conversion optimization approaches that are not function of our marketing tactics but of the customer and our business goals. Personas matter, just like segmenting does, but ultimately we are getting increasingly personal in our customer interactions and thus also conversion tactics.

The importance of a conversion optimization strategy

An existing way to improve conversion that comes to mind here is customer journey analysis. Generally speaking it's about having a global way of looking at all the steps that prospects take before and when arriving on websites, blogs etc. in the various stages of their “journey”.

Although customer journey analysis is the most widely used method for improving conversion, according to Econsultancy’s latest ‘Conversion Report’ (48% of respondents), it is also a challenging job.

Econsultancy found that only 14% of respondents felt they did customer journey analysis well while 96% of marketers said “they felt it was valuable”.

In practice, conversion optimization is still all too often an exercise that lacks integration, coordination, strategy and someone who is responsible for the overall conversion optimization approach and results in function of the customer journey.

With all the techniques and platforms that exist to measure and improve conversion and all the different online media and interaction channels people and marketers use, integration and customer journey based conversion seems the way to go.

Companies that approach their conversion efforts in such an integrated way do report better overall conversion rates.

The main challenge might be corporate culture.