11 behavioral personas grounded in analytics, usability research, and journey mapping — built to inform product, marketing, and sales.
Lifeway serves a diverse faith-based customer base — pastors, ministry leaders, Sunday School teachers, volunteers, church administrators — each with distinct goals, behaviors, and barriers to purchase.
Product, marketing, and sales teams were all making decisions about this audience without a shared, research-grounded understanding of who the customers actually were or how they behaved.
The research question: who are Lifeway's customers, and how do they discover, evaluate, and purchase?
On-site clickstream data, search term analysis, filter usage patterns, funnel analysis, and conversion pathway characteristics — broken down per segment.
Search behavior · Filter combos · Conversion paths · Session patterns
Moderated and unmoderated studies revealing how customers evaluate products, navigate the site, and make purchase decisions across each segment.
Comprehension · Navigation · Decision friction · Cart behavior
Full 7-stage journey maps per persona — from need recognition through post-purchase — identifying friction points and opportunities at each stage.
Need → Entry → Search → Evaluate → Cart → Checkout → Post-purchase
Each persona maps to a behavioral archetype — a cross-cutting pattern describing how that segment discovers and selects products. The archetypes surface what multiple personas share.
A named behavioral pattern classifying how this segment discovers and selects products — cross-referenced across all 11 personas.
Age, education, region, profession, primary ministry focus, top product need, confidence level, discovery channel preference.
Why they buy, what prompts a purchase cycle, what stops them from completing it — grounded in research, not assumptions.
Full 7-stage journey (Need → Entry → Search → Evaluate → Cart → Checkout → Post-Purchase) with stage-specific friction points per persona.
Observed on-site search terms, filter usage patterns, repeat search behavior, conversion pathway characteristics from analytics.
Tiered UX opportunities (High / Medium / Quick Win), Marketing recommendations, and Sales recommendations — one set per persona.
The search bar was the #1 discovery channel across all 11 personas — even for segments expected to browse. On-site search is the product's most important interface.
Across every segment, confirming doctrinal fit was the most important pre-purchase step. When this signal was absent or unclear, users stalled or exited.
Every persona listed unclear inclusions as a top shopping pain point. What's in the kit, who it's for, and what format it comes in must be answered before users commit.
Unclear whether pricing was per-person, per-kit, or digital versus print caused hesitation even when users were ready to buy.
One set for product and design. One for marketing. One for sales. Each addresses how that team should act on what the research found about this segment.
Example: Pastor persona
Example: Pastor persona
Example: Pastor persona
Shared with and used by product, UX, marketing, and sales teams — not siloed within the research function.
Teams across the organization gained a common vocabulary for talking about customers — grounded in research rather than assumption or instinct.
Designed to be updated as new research accumulates — not treated as a one-time deliverable that ages out of use.