A little background on today’s post. There are many smart people in our space who are starting to answer the “What” and “Why” questions of eCommerce. I therefore spend a lot of time wrapping my head around questions that start with the word “How”. Three specific instances in the last two weeks have had me asking a lot of “How” questions about the concept of Personas.

• Jim Sterne gave a fantastic presentation with the WAA in
  Ottawa two weeks ago and spent some time talking about the concept of personas. In order to have a truly relevant website, he feels that you need to understand who the primary personas of your target market are, and ensure that each page of your site has something for each of them. I asked a question to a subsequent speaker regarding the difference between personas and segments. For more details check out this great Bryan Eisenberg article called “Getting the most out of your Personas”
• I spent all of Monday evening skipping back and forth between the NHL trade deadline and an insightful article by Theo Papadakis on Occam’s Razor about engagement profiling and metrics. He states that while visitor engagement is important for marketers, web analytics can only provide relative degrees of engagement (and even those can’t be proven to be positive or negative). This post created a ton of great comments, and blog crossover to a post by Joseph Carrabis on Web Analytics Demystified about Engagement….I could barely concentrate on my hockey following that thread around…
• I am working with a Sitebrand customer right now to build programs to optimize the overall conversion of high level segments. We are going to be using our product to create an ongoing dialogue with certain types of site visitors through every step in the conversion funnel. So I have spent a few weeks talking about nothing but segments and personas and engagement…

A lot to chew on huh? To break all the above into one sentence: The age of actionable analytics is upon us. Clicks and pageviews and basic reports are now on the shelf beside my betamax player and Commodore 64. All of the thought leaders in the analytics space are focused on using data to support marketing initiatives like persona and engagement optimization, as opposed to doing marketing to fix/resolve issues found in data.

So here are my list of “How” questions, which my customers and I are starting to answer together with the Sitebrand tool (shameless plug):

• How does a typical eMarketing team cost justify the bandwidth required to build personas?
• How can engagement be used (and optimized) as a tactical element of every emarketing initiative?
• How can a properly executed segmentation initiative feed into (and out of) persona building and engagement mapping?

Generic questions for sure. But once we can start mapping actionable and tactical best practices to these “how” questions, we can earn the right with our internal budget holders to ask more questions down the line. As always feedback is appreciated, specifically on the ways you have asked and dealt with “how” questions in your organization.