Setting up personas

Personas are behaviours and interests that you define for customers. This allows you to send the most relevant content to them.

For example, a fashion retailer might create a persona called  ‘Fashionista Faye’, to describe college/uni students looking for trendy items at reasonable prices. They could then send this persona updates and discounts on their latest, fashion-forward stock, whilst excluding them from messages about more classic or higher-end items.

You can read more about personas, including how to define the right ones for your business, on our blog:

• 3 Tips for Creating More Useful Customer Personas
• Using Customer Personas to Guide Your Content Strategy

How to set up personas

Personas can be found under Contacts in Horizon.

1. Click the 'Add new persona' button to create a new persona.
   
   
2. As per the above example, you’ll need to think about the behaviours and interests of the persona.
   
   Behaviour: How will this persona act? What are they likely to purchase from you? Are they a frequent customer? Are they a big spender?
   
   Goals: What do they want from you? What items are they looking for? What needs are they trying to fulfill?
   
   Pain: What barriers might you or the customer come across? What’s preventing the customer from meeting the needs or desires mentioned above? What could make it difficult for them to do business with you?
   
   
3. It’s also a good idea to “humanise” your persona, to help you think about them as real people. To help with that, we recommend uploading an image for each persona, which you can do by clicking the three dots next to the ‘Photo for your persona’ field.
   
   
4. Click 'Save'

How to set up persona assignment

Now that your personas are in place, you can set rules to tell Horizon how to assign each customer or subscriber to the right persona for them.

1. Under your list of personas, click  '+Persona assignment'
   
   
2. You’ll see that the first persona you created is the ‘Default persona’. You should create a default persona, such as ‘Other’ or ‘Unknown’, for any customer that doesn’t match a persona rule. For more information on this, see how personas are calculated below.
   
   
3. Click  'Add new assignment rule'
   
   
4. Make sure the correct persona is selected.
   
   
5. There are two ways to define rules for a persona: if a customer is within a group or whether they match a particular set of rules. If you want to use a particular group, click , select your group and save. If not, carry on.
   
   
6. Select ‘meets these conditions’. Set the rules that best suit your persona. For example, for Fashionista Faye, I may wish to find all customers who are:
   - 18 - 25
   - Female
   - Regularly spend under £50
   - Interests: Fashion
   
   
7. Click 'Add'
   
   
8. Your persona will be listed as ‘Rule 1’, with the default persona underneath. You can manually move a rule up or down using the button on the right hand side. You can also edit or delete them.

How are persona assignment rules calculated?

Rules are calculated in number order. Horizon will start by checking whether a customer matches ‘Rule 1’. If they match, that persona is assigned. If they don’t match, Horizon will move on to ‘Rule 2’. It will go through all rules and if no rules match, it will assign the contact to the ‘default persona’.