Driving Omnichannel Retail Strategies with AI-generated Personas

Human psychology is interesting. We like things we can associate with, reminding us of ourselves and those around us.

This concept is heavily used in advertising, marketing, and web design to build a connection between the product and the customer. Brands leverage different design and marketing techniques to make their offerings more appealing to their target audience.

But how do you personalize your website designs if you don't know who your audience is? With buyer personas.

Follow along to learn how Super Butcher used data-driven personas to optimize their marketing strategies and achieve revenue growth.

About the Company

Super Butcher is an Australian family-owned retail business specializing in selling meat products. It is a leading name in the butchery industry known for its commitment to quality, service, and customer satisfaction.

Super Butcher has 9 stores on the eastern coast, from Brisbane to Gold Coast, plus an online store and offers a wide variety of meats like beef, pork, lamb, and chicken sourced directly from Australian producers.

With a focus on customer satisfaction, the company currently serves over 500,000 local families annually, offering personalized in-store experiences and assistance.

The Problem

To leverage technology to better respond to customers’ omni-channel needs, Super Butcher has been working with Kelly Slessor, an e-commerce coach and a digital marketing expert, over the past four years.

Super Butcher was looking for opportunities to scale up customer engagement and improve average order value and online and in-store conversions.

The Solution

In order to gain a deep understanding of Super Butcher’s customers and their needs, Kelly signed up for Persona by Delve AI.

Persona by Delve AI is an AI-powered persona generator that creates data-driven personas for a business by analyzing web analytics, social audiences, and customer data of the business and merging it with over 40+ data sources.

The tool helped the team meet the following objectives:

• Automatically segment and create buyer personas for Super Butcher’s online audience
• Identify high-valued and low-valued customer segments

Implementation

One has to analyze many factors before developing and refining marketing strategies that drive engagement and conversions. For example, their target audience, best-performing segments, resonating messages, pages, advertisement channels, and more.

1. Generate buyer personas

Buyer personas are the best bet to understanding target audiences for businesses. They are fictional characters that represent ideal customers and help optimize marketing strategies.

Kelly generated buyer personas representing Super Butcher’s website audience automatically in a matter of hours using Persona by Delve AI.

A total of seven audience segments were created, with each persona providing detailed information such as:

• Buyers' goals, challenges, triggers, and barriers
• Preferences (news, sports, travel, music, and television)
• Lifestyle, interests, values, and hobbies
• Products purchased or likely to be purchased
• Resonating pages and topics
• Attributes specific to the food and beverage industry, such as preparation types, cooking styles, health considerations, occasions, etc.
• Traffic acquisition channels and keywords

Along with these buyer insights, Kelly also looked at sample user journeys for each of the segments to see how visitors interacted with their website.

2. Identify high-performing segments

According to Jaden Hassan, Marketing Manager at Super Butcher, in-store, the chain had a core buyer demographic consisting of males aged 24 to 54 years.

Personas generated by Delve AI did support this understanding to some extent:

• Six out of the eight personas generated were that of male customers.
• They were bouncers, cart abandoners, and low-valued buyers.

But also identified additional high-value buyer segments online - “24 to 50-year-old female grocery buyer”.

This insight about the customer segments and their channel preferences based on gender and age was particularly useful as Super Butcher could now use it to deliver “personalized customer experiences online."

3. Update messaging and content

Email campaigns and creative strategies were refined using messaging and imagery that largely sought to appeal to each segment’s channel preferences, lifestyles, values, and interests.

“Our customers online, 24 to 54-year-old female grocery buyers, want convenience, they want to feed their family healthier meals, and they want to feel part of a community”, said Jaden.

So, Super Butcher also optimized their website design and landing pages to attract said customers. The marketing and web development team worked together to revamp their website, including adding a Recipes & Tips section and prominently featuring women in imagery and testimonials.

From welcome emails to recipe suggestions, the marketing team endeavored to provide added value to their buyers.

The Results

Super Butcher achieved the following results after refining their email marketing strategies based on persona insights:

• Higher conversion rates: 4.5% conversion on emails for online purchases and 6-7% on emails for in-store purchases.
• Improved click-through rates: 29% improvement in email click-through rate with consideration of customer channel preferences.
• Loyalty customers spend 50% more than newly acquired customers, in return for incentives/discounts.

Final Thoughts

Super Butcher was able to discover a crucial market segment using Persona by Delve AI. By further optimizing their website content and email campaigns with data-driven insights, they were not only able to successfully connect with their target audience but also increase profits.

“Persona by Delve AI is a great tool for data-driven marketers. Understanding the customer reduces the cost to acquisition. Currently, most customer insights are based on anecdotal data - having this depth of information makes it easier to develop plans and target digital marketing activity. Delve AI's technology and approach to customer personas is the missing link for retailers. I have seen it in action and seen the results that come from Delve AI.”

"As an omnichannel retailer, it’s easy to assume that your target market remains the same across your brick-and-mortar stores and your e-commerce presence. Working with Kelly and Delve AI helped us quickly and effectively understand that this is not always the case. By using these insights to drive our online persona development, we’ve been able to fine-tune our strategies, supercharge our loyalty program, and significantly boost our engagement and sales.”

Link to The E-commerce Tribe talk with Jaden Hassan