More Than 1 Customer ‘Avatar’? Here’s How to Write Your Email Copy

A few days back I tackled a question from subscriber Carl about tapping your customer’s deepest desires.

Like many other copywriters, I use a tool called an “avatar” for this.

An avatar is a composite—a fictional character that represents your ideal customer.

Carl asks a followup:

When I did the exercises you have also done (as so many courses train you to), I found my research lad me to a minimum of THREE customer profiles.

That’s because the diversity within my customer base meant I could not be talking to a 53 year old man in Toronto… when there were 32 year old women in Stafford-Upon-Avon (A small town in the UK where Shakespeare came from).

I know both Terry Dean and Ryan Levesque have addressed this issue by diversifying their funnels and lists – however – How do you cater for this in the beginning when you’re jut starting out creating your avatar?

Carl’s situation is actually VERY common.

Most businesses don’t have one typical customer—they have 3-5, or even more.

You can get really crazy about this. At Simple Programmer, I’ve identified half a dozen archetypes that we sell to.

So how do you deal with this multiple personality craziness and write something that resonates with your audience?

The first thing is to take a step back and make sure that you’re actually defining your avatars correctly—based on PROBLEMS and GOALS, not pure demographics.

I detect a hint of this in Carl’s question.

It’s useful to know details like the ages of your customers and where they live—but only so much as it influences their goals and the specific problem they’re trying to solve.

For example, at Simple Programmer one of our avatars is a 21-year-old guy who just earned his computer science degree.

Another is a 33-year-old family man with a corporate job.

Both of these customers are interested in advancing their careers.

But one is struggling to get that first job with no experience, and the other is more interested in finding a stable job where his contributions are valued.

Totally different problems.

By approaching your avatars this way, in terms of what your customer is trying to achieve, it’s a lot easier to figure out what you should say to them.

The way this plays out when I’m creating an email course or sales page is this:

I’ll choose one problem to focus on as the “theme” for the entire course. Usually this problem is one that’s shared by at least 2-3 of the avatars.

Then for each email I’ll choose stories, example, pop culture references, etc. that resonate with one specific avatar.

This way the overall theme of the email course is relevant to a broader swath of the email list.

And with each email, there’s a segment of your list that reads it and thinks, “Wow, he wrote this just for me.”

Which is exactly the kind of personal bond that leads to satisfied customers.