Learn how to create detailed buyer personas for your newsletter, helping you connect with your ideal audience, boost engagement, and grow your brand effectively.
A buyer persona is a description of your perfect customer. For a newsletter creator, this means figuring out the avatar of your ideal subscriber.
Buyer personas often include:
- Demographic data (age, race, gender)
- Behaviors (brand preferences, purchasing process)
- Psychographic data (values, interests, beliefs)
- Professional Information (job title, industry)
- Challenges
Really, that’s all just a fancy way of saying that you understand your subscribers really well. You know them so well that you can target them, write to them, and sell to them.
Let’s dive into why that’s important and how to put together a buyer persona (or multiple buyer personas for you overachievers).
Why is a Buyer Persona Important?
Once you have a buyer persona in place, you’ll naturally find that you can connect with your readers on a deeper level.
Of course, you already understand on some level what your subscribers are looking for, or you likely wouldn’t have started a newsletter. The most important characteristic of your buyer persona is the shared interest or connection.
But real growth and revenue will come as you deepen your understanding of who they are and what they want. What jobs are you helping them with?
The Newsette is a tremendous example of this. They’re essentially a recommendation newsletter that shares news, tips, and advice on the latest in shopping, style, and career advancement.
It’s very clear that they target people who are:
- Younger women (older Gen Z, younger Millennials).
- Career-driven.
- Fashionable, especially in the workplace.
- In a higher income bracket.
According to Entrepreneur, The Newsette is valued at $200 million!
Much of this success comes from the reader feeling like she is in the right place. Open one of their daily newsletters, and within 10 seconds, you’ll understand who it’s for. That unmistakable sense of who belongs to this community has built an enormous group of raving fans who check in daily with The Newsette.
The question is, how can you offer that clear sense of belonging with your newsletter?
Do You Need a Buyer Persona to Be Successful?
In most situations, the answer is yes: a buyer persona will contribute to your success—or, at the very least, raise the level of success you would otherwise have.
With a buyer persona, you can:
- Advertise effectively by speaking directly to pain points.
- Write in a way that makes sense to your subscribers (you’d talk differently about business to a CEO than you would to a Gen Zer.)
- Create products that directly address your subscribers’ challenges.
- Better understand how much to charge for products or subscriptions.
- Use other media that your subscribers will likely respond to.
Perhaps the biggest benefit to creating a buyer persona comes when finding sponsors. There's a direct relationship between how well you can define your audience and the revenue that you bring in.
If you can show potential sponsors that your audience is 60% male CEOs in their 40s who make an average of $200k per year, you'll have sponsors lined up down the street.
14 Data Points to Include in Your Buyer Persona
While not all of these will apply to your specific audience, here’s a list that’ll help you build a fairly complete buyer persona:
- Age - This can help you relate to your audience. For example, does it make more sense to mention grandkids or talk about starting a career?
- Gender - Even if it’s not obvious which gender is more likely to subscribe, you may collect data over time that makes it clear which gender prefers your newsletter.
- Location - Perfect for newsletters that follow a specific sports team, share a city’s or state’s news stories, or are part of a multi-brand media company with chapters across the country.
- Income - Higher earners spend more on your sponsors' products.
- Familial Status - If your entire list consists of parents, it’s easy to connect over having kids. If you have a dating newsletter, it makes sense that your buyer persona would be a single person.
- Pop Culture References - Does it make more sense to reference the Beatles or Kendrick Lamar? Should you quote Indiana Jones or The Notebook?
- Brand Preferences - What is your buyer persona’s favorite car brand? Type of soda? Magazines? Similar to pop culture references, it’s a great way to connect to your audience.
- Technological Capabilities - Writing about AI updates to CTOs will carry a different level of complexity than writing about general tech news.
- Experience Level With Industry - Are you writing to beginners or experts? You’ll write differently to someone just learning about creative writing than to someone who’s published books.
- Spending Preferences Within Industry - People who golf tend to spend more on their hobby than someone who follows the news.
- Challenges Related to Your Industry - What problem does your target audience have that you can solve? For some, it’s a need for succinct marketing news. For others, it’s how to find freelance gigs.
- Job Title - If you run a B2B newsletter, determine whether you’re targeting employees, CEOs, middle managers, or even a specific role, such as an email marketer or customer service rep.
- Company Size - Another B2B data point. If you have an engaged list of 1,000 CEOs of large companies, that’s worth more than most newsletters with 100k subscribers.
- Industry-Specific Data - This is our catchall metric. What other information can help you find, connect, and potentially market to your audience? If you’re in lending, knowing an average credit score can help. If you’re in fitness, knowing what equipment your average reader has access to is useful. Think on this one for a while.
5 Strategies to Build Out an Accurate Buyer Persona
Now that you have a good idea of what an effective buyer persona should look like, let’s discuss how to collect that information.
1. Start With Your Best Guess
Most build newsletters on topics they’re familiar with. For example, an avid runner might write a newsletter about running.
This means that your first data point is…you. Start filling out your information with your age, gender, income, etc.
Of course, you may also have to take your best guess on some things, especially if you believe you’re an outlier. Maybe you collect baseball cards, but you’re a 60-year-old woman. What if you love to golf, but your income is significantly lower than that of most who play regularly?
With a dose of common sense, you can adjust your data to align with what you believe will be your ideal core buyer persona.
2. Check Your Collected Data
If you’ve already been running a newsletter, you might have some of this data on hand. Many companies use a CRM (customer relationship management) tool to help organize information collected from leads.
If you have this available, bulk-export that database and use it to continue filling in more pieces of the puzzle.
3. Survey Your Subscribers
Now, let’s go right to the source.
There are two main ways you can do this: contact individuals and/or send out a survey.
If you can identify several of your most engaged users, reaching out to them makes a ton of sense. In a perfect world, you’d get them on the phone and then offer a gift card for their time.
If they (or you) aren’t willing to do that, you could settle for an email interview.
If you have a non-trivial number of subscribers, send out a survey to gather more information about your readers. Ask as many questions as you think you can get away with. This will be a key part of your buyer persona.
4. Conduct Extensive Market Research
For most of this, fire up Google and begin typing in whatever you can think of.
For example, a quick search for “research average income of golfers” returned this featured snippet:
We get income information and more from the National Golf Foundation. This is a tremendous piece of data that can help us.
However, you should also understand that the main demo of golfers might not be the same as your subscriber base. Subscribers, in general, are younger, so that “46-year-old” demo for golfers may actually skew closer to 30-40 for your newsletter.
5. Build Multiple Buyer Personas, if Necessary
With the first four points on this list, you should be able to put together a thorough buyer persona. However, also understand this:
Your buyer persona is a best guess and may only represent a portion of your newsletter audience.
To continue an example from above, there are women who enjoy collecting sports cards, even if they are in the minority. It might make sense for you to create a secondary buyer persona for other significant audiences.
You should primarily write and market to your main buyer persona, but here are a few ways to use a secondary buyer persona to grow your newsletter:
- Run PPC ads with copy, images, and landers that appeal to the secondary buyer persona.
- Make occasional, specific mentions in your newsletter targeted to that buyer persona (“for you women collectors out there…”).
- Secondary buyer personas can sometimes become primary buyer personas. Split-test different versions of your newsletter that cater to different buyer personas. You might find that a secondary buyer persona gets a better response rate!
How to Compile Your Buyer Persona
Now that you’ve got the data, it’s time to organize it in a way that makes sense.
The most obvious way is to put it all in a spreadsheet or document. This is essentially your data dump—the one place where you store every piece of information you uncovered. While it should be organized and easy to read, it also doesn’t need to be professionally designed.
However, it also makes sense to keep a version printed out for quick reference. Here’s an example from Wordstream:
With something like this taped to the side of your computer or on a visible wall, you can keep your buyer persona in mind at all times. For a simple print-out, you’re better off only including the most important pieces of data, while the rest stays in your spreadsheet for periodic review.
If you’re running a larger newsletter operation, ensure that every employee has this buyer persona visible. Everything you do should be tailored to your buyer persona.
How a Buyer Persona Can Help You Grow Multiple Brands
Expanding to multiple newsletters becomes much easier with an on-point buyer persona. It’s much easier to figure out your strategy, which might include:
- Creating a newsletter to fill in a gap with your buyer persona. Perhaps your current newsletter targets middle-aged men, so you launch a newsletter brand that targets women.
- Creating a newsletter to complement your buyer persona. If you have a fitness newsletter, starting or acquiring a nutrition newsletter can help fuel growth for both.
A large-scale example of this could be a newsletter that shares important news stories in a specific city.
To scale your newsletter, the logical choice is to expand to more cities. Your buyer persona will change slightly based on the population of a new location, much of your collected data will be relevant for your new location as well.
For a multi-brand media company, there isn’t another solution out there quite like Letterhead. We make running multiple newsletters quicker and more profitable with tools that help you curate content and automate workflows.
Schedule a call with us today, and we’ll show you how we can scale your newsletter business with less work.