Bringing personas to life: Turn them into a shared tool for your email marketing team
Summarize
In the previous article on this topic, we explored personas in email marketing. You might have nodded in agreement and thought, "Yeah, that's exactly how we describe all our personas."
Then I have the following questions for you:
- How often do you update your personas, and how much time does it take?
- Are you sure all members of your email marketing team can access your persona descriptions, refer to them at any time, and adjust their copy, design, and strategies?
As promised, in this article, we examine this tool from a new perspective and try to make personas a living, shared tool — guiding every step of your email production to make your email marketing truly convert into sales.
Key takeaways
- Use personas actively at every email production stage.
- Keep them alive, not static, by regularly updating them with new data and insights.
- Make them accessible, AI-assisted, and aligned across teams to ensure that teams truly know who they're targeting with their email campaigns.
Why early personas don’t work without updating
Early personas are typically assumptions, not validated insights, so they need to be refined as your client base grows and new information emerges.
Furthermore, the world is changing rapidly, including business sectors, so your clients' motivations, living conditions, and preferences also may change. When new trends and technologies emerge, and global events occur, behaviors will shift and be reflected in the data you collect.
Thus, commissioning a one-time, expensive persona creation from a marketing agency, spending months on development and research, and then sending emails for years without changing anything won’t work. It's the same as creating emails without knowing your target audience.
When preparing any campaign, your personas must be relevant and accessible to all team members, allowing you to be confident that you're telling clients exactly what they need to hear and communicating with them in a language they understand. You also must ensure that new information about the target audience isn't lost, that it's integrated into the shared database that creates personas, and that it forms the basis for your marketing campaigns.
Thus, personas become a significant element of brand identity, and their descriptions are incorporated into brand guidelines. They help the entire team understand what and how to write to keep customers engaged.
How to update persona information
The first step toward creating relevant personas is to start treating them like "living documents," i.e., files that are reviewed and updated constantly with new information. Update them every three to six months based on customer data.
To ensure that customer persona data updates are as seamless and regular as possible, you should include the following elements in your process:
- data analysis: Open and click rates, conversion data, and purchasing trends across segments;
- customer feedback: Surveys, support tickets, and social media insights to capture changes in motivations or objections;
- market signals: Seasonality, new product launches, or broader cultural shifts that influence buying habits.
How to store persona insights and share them across teams
The problem with storing persona information and insights is that once we think we've perfected descriptions, we tend to condense them into beautiful PDFs and forget about them over time. To avoid this, here are some recommendations for storing and sharing personas.
Best practices for storing and sharing personas across all team members:
- use collaborative tools: Notion, Miro, Confluence, ClickUp, Google Docs can be used to work with data simultaneously;
- keep personas concise: Create one-page sheets or visual cards with all key insights; short information is more likely to be reread before developing a new marketing campaign;
- integrate persona snippets into email campaign briefs: For example, you can use the commenting feature in the Stripo editor to add persona notes to master templates that the entire team works with;
- make personas visual and easy to scan: Use names, traits, pain points, and motivations;
- create a “Persona Hub,” i.e., a single source of truth for the whole team. (We'll discuss what this might look like later in the article.)
How to streamline persona updating and sharing
Even if you agree with the arguments above and want to update your persona descriptions regularly, you still may have a problem: Where do I find the time? Manual persona updates are time-consuming.
Updating personas is faster than using AI solutions. AI tools like ChatGPT can transcribe and analyze customer interviews; detect recurring keywords, sentiment, and new trends in customer behavior; and summarize long customer surveys or support chats into persona updates.
Practical workflow for updating personas using AI:
- collect raw input: This includes interviews, survey data, and support tickets;
- use AI for pattern recognition. Create prompts that help you extract relevant information from a dataset and structure it;
- to create new personas, you can upload a sample of your existing persona, along with all new information, to the AI and set the task of creating a new persona using the same structure;
- ask the AI to provide voice tone recommendations for communication with each persona and specific examples of how to use them in email campaigns. You can copy these recommendations into the AI tools that help you generate email content to ensure the most specific texts and images.
The human team can validate and integrate all outputs and changes. This use of AI will speed up your persona-updating process. Can we take this even further?
What could be the ideal tool for teamwork with personas?
At Stripo, we see that email marketing teams need an AI-powered tool to create and manage personas that can reduce the time and effort this process currently requires dramatically.
Such a tool should include the following functionalities:
- allow uploading results of in-depth client interviews;
- automatically collect behavioral data from the website, CRM, and ESP via API;
- consolidate all gathered information in a single database;
- analyze, validate, and enrich the data, e.g., extract insights from interviews and link them to specific situations;
- based on these insights, generate statements tied to personas (e.g., their pain points, interests, and other characteristics) and assign a representative level for each task;
- integrate with other tools, such as an email builder, to serve as a connector and central hub for persona visualization;
- enable all team members to access and use the same data to stay aligned.
Such a solution would transform static persona profiles into dynamic, continuously evolving ones, keeping them accurate and ensuring true team alignment in understanding personas. It ensures that every team member has access to the full, consistent set of data, instead of fragmented verbal updates.
Practical applications of such a tool:
- can be updated easily and continuously to keep profiles relevant;
- is accessible to all marketing team members via a shared company account;
- stores links to all original data sources;
- generates tone-of-voice recommendations based on persona information;
- uses all persona data to create prompts for generating text, visuals, campaign ideas, and engagement strategies.
Wrapping up
To create compelling content, your email marketing team must understand clearly who it’s writing for and how your brand should sound. That's why it's essential to build and maintain detailed, living customer personas in a shared space accessible to everyone involved. Emerging AI-powered tools will help teams keep personas up-to-date, eliminate repetitive tasks, and free up time for what truly matters: creativity and strategy.