Free customer persona templates and examples

Picture yourself on a guided fishing trip, armed with your fishing rod, bait, and guidance from a professional angler. Just like having the right bait, gear, and knowledge can help you attract a school of fish, the right customer information can help you attract your desired group of customers.

Think of a customer persona as the ultimate fishing guide. It can help you visualize where your customers are, how they behave, and what they like. However, crafting a customer or buyer persona from scratch can be intimidating, and you might need clarification on what information to include. To help you successfully cast into the seas of business, we’ve crafted a universal customer persona template and five editable examples that can help you reel in new and existing customers.

Follow along to learn more about customer personas, their importance, and how you can create one before download the customizable template.

More in this guide:

• Why are customer personas important?
• 5 types of customer persona templates
• How to create a customer persona
• Frequently asked questions
• Improve your CX for all customer personas

Why are customer personas important?

Customer personas are important because they help your business better understand your customers by segmenting them into specific groups. When creating personas, your business will take a deep dive into your customers’ interests, goals, pain points, and more. And putting the needs of your customer first can help your business build a customer-focused culture.

In doing so, you can identify what makes your customers tick and gain valuable insights into how to tailor aspects of your business to strengthen your connection with them and improve their experience. This might look like using personas to help create a new marketing campaign or inform your customer service training.

5 types of customer persona templates

Depending on your business and goals, you can create different types of customer personas. Some businesses may care more about demographics and technological preferences, while others might want to create a persona that focuses solely on customers’ behaviors and values. Read along to learn more about five common types of customer personas and template examples to help get you started.

1. Demographic-based persona templates
2. Customer journey-based persona templates
3. Role-based persona templates
4. Psychographic persona templates
5. Technographic persona templates

Demographic-based persona templates

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Demographics are traits that help describe a population. With a demographic-based persona template, businesses can easily build a customer profile that focuses on a customer group’s demographic factors, such as:

Understanding the demographics of your target customers can help your business offer products and services that make the most sense for your audience. For example, if your customer persona identifies as a male over the age of 60 who lives in the Midwest, you most likely won’t be successful selling, say, women’s surfing gear.

Customer journey-based persona templates

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You can also use a persona template to help map the customer journey for different personas. A customer journey map visually represents the various stages and customer touchpoints a buyer experiences when interacting with your business. While stages and touchpoints can vary across businesses, common examples include:

• Awareness: In this stage, your customer is discovering your business for the first time. A touchpoint in this stage might be seeing an ad for your business while browsing social media
• Consideration: After your customer is aware of your business, the next stage is the consideration of your products and services. A touchpoint in this stage might be a customer visiting your website to learn more about your products.
• Decision: Congratulations! Your customer has decided to make a purchase. Common touchpoints in the decision stage include using a coupon or promo code, or buying an item online or in-store.
• Adoption: In the adoption stage, your customer adopts your product or service and engages further with your business, often with your customer service team. An example of a touchpoint in this stage is a customer seeking an answer to a common question using an FAQ page.
• Advocacy: Lastly, the advocacy stage is when a customer becomes loyal to your company and begins recommending it to acquaintances. A touchpoint in this stage might be a customer leaving a positive review or renewing a subscription to your service.

A customer journey-based persona template can help your business tailor your customer experience design to different audience segments. For example, the journey of your young female customers may look different than that of older female customers. This can provide your business with valuable insights you can use to better meet your customers’ needs.

Role-based persona templates

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In a role-based persona, segment customers based on their specific role. For example, if you are a business specializing in sports equipment, you might create one persona representing coaches and another representing athletes.

This can help you tailor your business operations and provide customer-oriented support to better fit the needs of each group. For instance, a coach may be more receptive to marketing messaging about practice equipment, whereas an athlete may be more interested in athletic wear or running shoes.

Psychographic persona templates

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Psychographic personas focus on the psychological characteristics of your target users or customers. These may include:

• Attitude
• Lifestyle
• Values
• Interests
• Behavior

Insight into these characteristics can help you understand what’s important to your customers. For example, let’s say you run a business in the food industry. If you discover your customers value health and exercise and are interested in weightlifting, protein bars might be a product worth pursuing versus soda or candy.

Technographic persona templates

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Technographic personas help represent the technological preferences and habits of your customers. This may include your customers’ preferred:

• Devices
• Operating systems
• Communication channels

This type of information can help your business determine the best customer communication methods. For example, if your customer base prefers to use their mobile devices, you might consider implementing live chat support using mobile channels like WhatsApp.

A technographic persona may also help you create products that match your customers’ technological preferences. An example is if a business-to-business (B2B) software company rolls out a mobile version of their desktop software after discovering their customers have a strong habit of using their mobile devices.

How to create a customer persona

Now that you know the importance of customer personas and the different types you can create, let’s walk through how to make one.

• Research and gather customer data: Begin by assessing your existing data. This may include customer analytics, survey results, or quotes from customer conversations. To gather more information, you can interview your customers through focus groups.

• Choose a name and visual identity: A name and visual image can bring your customer persona to life and help you easily reference different personas internally when speaking about different groups of customers.

• Write a short bio: A short biography can help team members learn about your specific persona with a glance.

• Add a quote: Including a catchy quote that encapsulates your persona’s personality can help you effectively express the hypothetical customer’s attitude.

• Include demographics: Adding demographic information, such as age, gender identity, location, and job title, can help you quickly visualize your persona.

• Add personality traits: From creative to adventurous to shy, adding personality traits can help you better understand how customers operate and what is important to them.

• Determine their goals: Knowing your customers’ goals is critical. If you know what your customer wants to achieve, you can use that information to help meet their needs and provide good customer service along the way.

• Define their motivations and frustrations: Understanding what motivates and frustrates your persona can help you align your products and services to speak to your target market.

• Add what channels they use the most: Whether it’s social media, email, or live chat, figuring out what communication channels your audience uses can help you meet your customers where they are.

With the help of these tips and our handy customer persona templates, you can go from guessing what your customers want to giving them what they need in no time.

Frequently asked questions

Improve your CX for all customer personas

When working to provide a positive customer experience, leveraging customer persona templates is the tip of the iceberg. With a complete customer service solution like Zendesk, your business can gain valuable insights into customer sentiment, common customer pain points, recurring issues, and more.

Zendesk also empowers your business with robust customer profiles that can highlight key customer details for your support team. This data empowers your business to create detailed customer personas that can help reel in new customers.