If you are a store owner, it is important to know who you are trying to reach. Not everyone is your customer and knowing your target market will help you save thousands of dollars on marketing campaigns. We wrote a pretty epic blog post about customer personas for ecommerce, but to give you an example of how Wooassist does it, here are our two main customer personas. Meet Bob and Danny.
Say Hello to Bob
Bob is a freelance website developer who builds e-commerce site with WordPress and WooCommerce. Bob is super busy building a lot of websites and he receives more jobs from new clients on a monthly basis. He also hangs out online on different forums to communicate with other developers to seek help and assist others as well.
Some of the forums he has visited over the past few months are:
- https://wordpress.org/support/theme/storefront
- https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/woocommerce
- https://support.woothemes.com/hc/communities/public/topics/200102403-05-WooCommerce
He is updated with the latest trends of WooCommerce development and has also heard the new Storefront theme that WooThemes have developed.
He uses a macbook pro for developing websites and uses the following tools with his development:
- Codekit https://incident57.com/codekit/
- Chrome Developer Tools
- Sublime Text IDE – where all the coding happens
- Git for versioning
- SASS + Sussy (for styling – in replacement of plain CSS)
A lot of Bob’s clients come back to him after 6-12 months and want help with WooCommerce and the other plugin updates. Other times old clients were installing new plugins which broke their site and they needed “urgent” help.
Bob doesn’t like this sort of maintenance work. He wants to help his previous clients but he is busy creating websites for new clients. If he tries to do both he ends up losing a lot of free time for himself and his family.
He tried to outsource his customer support tasks to Elance. Some worked ok, but the ones that didn’t took him more time to fix than if he had done it himself.
Bob needed a company he was comfortable referring his clients to for the support he didn’t want to do, so he could just focus on his passion of building new websites. He had suggested www.wpcurve.com and www.wpsitecare.com but his clients didn’t want to pay for monthly subscriptions and he would prefer to recommend specialists in Woocommerce not just WordPress.
Then he found out about Wooassist. Wooassist was being helpful on a lot of posts on the support forum for both WooCommerce and Storefront. They have also built theme and plugin extensions that had benefited Bob in some of his projects.
He checked out what Wooassist offers, and was a bit skeptical at first, but liked the testimonials about the company. He also learned that his clients could get the first 2 hours free of charge, so he thought he would try them out.
Bob gave Wooassist a few tricky tasks to test them and was pleased with how they performed. He especially loved their process and the concise reporting. He then then felt comfortable to refer Wooassist to his clients to do support for them, and the rest was history.
Get to Know Danny
Danny is the owner of an e-commerce store. He has 4 full-time employees and his wife works part-time in accounts. He will employ contractors regularly during busy periods.
Danny had a local agency design his website and it cost him $3000. Over the next 12 months he required a number of customisations and these totalled to about $3000 also. He was happy with the agency, but didn’t like the $100/hr fees so decided to skill-up and spent a considerable amount of time training himself in WordPress and WooCommerce. He now knows enough to make a lot of changes himself.
Because of this knowledge he also now feels more confident to outsources some of these tasks. He has tried Elance and Odesk with limited success and has gone back to either doing it himself, or what is too hard for him, asking the agency that built the site to do it for him.
When faced with problems that require a more technical solution he first searches for free plugins in the WordPress repository and reads the forums and reviews. If he can’t find what he needs he asks questions in the forums hoping that maybe he can get advice and perhaps a few snippets of code that can solve his problem.
He knows that a single line of wrong code can bring down the entire website down so he is very wary of adding code by himself. The solutions work most of the time, thankfully, but it’s not the best use of his time.
Danny wants to spend more time attending to marketing and building his business. He has a long list of marketing initiatives he wants to get up and running with the website that he is sure will bring in more sales, but he is just too swamped with the ongoing tasks currently on his plate.
He also wants to spend more time with his family.
He feels he has failed with Elance and Odesk and doesn’t want to go down that route again. He has considered employing a full-time developer, but can’t justify the expense and really needs an all-rounder rather than a full on developer.
Danny, like most business owners, is under a lot of stress. He feels the weight of the world on his shoulders to keep his business afloat, his family comfortable and his employees employed. He loves e-commerce, but gets frustrated sometimes by the technology that he doesn’t completely understand.
He would love to be able to afford a full-time developer to take care of this and worry about it for him, but his business is just not to that scale yet. His main issue with Elance contractors was them not communicating with him in a way that would allow him to know they had his back and were working on his problems. He wants to be able to go to bed at night and know that his store is in good hands and exactly what will be done while he sleeps.
That’s when he stumbles upon Wooassist probably from a forum post somewhere or through Google search. He is now able to hire a WordPress and WooCommerce expert for the fraction of the cost of a full-time developer. And the rest is history.
How about you? Do you know who your customers are? If not, you might want to spend some time creating a persona. Is this post helpful? Let us know what you think in the comments.
You install the plugin just like any other plugin.
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