Last week we talked about the different browsers and their share of the current market, and towards the end, posed the question ‘what does it matter?’

When designing a site or re-targeting your current site, it is often a helpful exercise to step back and ask yourself who your customer is. For larger companies ‘Customer Profiling‘ is second nature and they will probably profile in such detail that they would be able to tell you that, for example, 87% of their customers are ABC1, technically literate and cash-rich time-poor.

Armed with this kind of data there are a number of factors that can be considered to affect your customer’s relationship with your site. To give some idea, let’s consider the customer profile above, which would be a typical profile for a gadget shop for instance:

- A technically literate customer is more likely to use an alternative browser so make sure your site works in all browser versions.  Equally they are more likely to have a mobile device such as an iPod or phone which they use to surf the web. Try to reduce the clutter and have a concise message.

- A cash-rich, time-poor customer would be fairly price-insensitive but would need the information displayed in a punchy, readable manner. In the case of retail the product would need to be purchased quickly, utilising a quick payment method such as taking minimal details, remembering the account and using a quick payment method such as PayPal.

These factors would be altered through a combination of good site design, persuasive copywriting, search engine targeting and endless testing. The key to effective use of these factors is to monitor measurable deliverables such as Conversion Rates, Purchases and Enquiries and try different approaches. Too often a site can be built for the client, not the customer and unlike traditional offline media, a website offers the possibility of constant refinement in a virtuous feedback loop.

Although this can sound daunting, the actual practice can be as simple as changing a couple of factors and measuring the improvement. In my next post I’ll be discussing how to track your customer’s progress through your site and analysing the reasons for customer dropout and how to counter this.