Building an eSIM customer persona: Who are your ideal users?

Stop throwing darts in the dark! Your ideal eSIM customer isn't a shadowy figure – they're a traveler with needs, expectations, and motivations.

A customer persona will help narrow down your marketing, sales, and product efforts with more precision and accuracy. 

We spoke with Ina Ghita, Senior User Researcher at Airalo, to get expert insights on building effective customer personas.

What is a customer persona?

Customer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. They are based on real data and research and help you understand who your customers are, what they need, and how you can best serve them.

A clear customer persona gives your marketing and sales efforts a direction and purpose. Without one, you’re casting a wide net and hoping for the best. A well-defined persona ensures alignment across marketing campaigns, product roadmaps, sales strategies, and partnerships.

You create marketing campaigns that truly resonate by tailoring your offerings to specific user needs and behaviors. Whether it’s travelers looking for affordable data plans or tech-savvy users demanding seamless connectivity, understanding your eSIM customer helps drive adoption and loyalty.

What are the key elements of a well-defined customer persona?

Customer personas vary, but the key elements focus on understanding your customer’s needs and preferences. A strong persona may include:

• Demographics: Age, location, job title, and other relevant details.
• Needs and preferences: How do they stay connected while traveling? What support and communication styles do they prefer?
• Pain points: What challenges do they face? Are they more concerned about cost or security? Are they tech-savvy?
• Motivations: What drives their purchasing decisions? What benefits matter most to them?
• Lifestyle: Daily routines and habits that influence their connectivity choices.

3 steps to build your customer personas

We've listed the three steps you'll need to follow to create your customer personas.

We understand that organizations range in industry and size. So, we've provided tips for companies with resources to invest in building customer personas, as well as companies just starting out.

Step 1: Gather data

Use both quantitative and qualitative data to create a well-rounded view of your customers.  Use quantitative data to ensure the sample is big enough to be significant. Then, use qualitative data to understand the "why" and to dive deeper.

As Ina, notes:

"We do qualitative research to understand why and to get rich information. We do quantitative research to understand what percentage." 

Start with your quantitative data sources, such as web analytics, and then complement that behavioral data with surveys. Surveys are a great approach to understand self-reported attitudes and beliefs. When creating surveys, only include unbiased and non-leading questions. The questions should range from demographic to behavioral. 

Ina recommends;

"Start with surveys to understand the main themes or pain points, then conduct interviews to delve deeper into customer motivations and pain points." 

You want to understand the "why" behind those trends to transform those insights into product, marketing, or selling points. 

For qualitative research, we suggest the following methods: 

• Informational feedback calls: Talk with customers and gather their feedback
• Structured interviews: Guide users through series of questions to gain qualitative insights

Data gathering tips for smaller teams: 

For smaller teams with limited resources, Ina suggests starting with a proto-persona. This serves as an early-stage representation of a customer segment. This involves identifying a market segment or subsegment and stepping into their mindset to craft an initial profile based on their likely characteristics, behaviors, and needs.

Proto-personas are a great starting point for understanding your audience and shaping early strategies. However, they should be treated as a hypothesis — validated and refined over time through ongoing research and real-world data collection.

Step 2: Identify trends

Once you've compiled a significant pool of data, you'll be able to spot certain commonalities, differences, and trends at a macro level. This will allow you to categorize and "follow the data."

The next step is to find patterns to group people. Make sure your group size still remains large enough to be accurately representative and relevant.

To spot trends, here are some examples of questions to ask yourself:

• What are the most common pain points? Categorize them into common paint points. For example: data roaming charges, Wi-Fi struggles, or inability to monitor data usage. 
• Which connectivity needs are most frequently mentioned? Create buckets of common needs. For example: productivity working abroad, safety, budgeting. 
• How do different customer segments prioritize affordability, reliability, or flexibility? Categorize the common priorities users have.
• Why do customers choose to buy from you? What is the unique selling point that differentiates your product? 
• Are there seasonal or location-based trends influencing their purchasing habits? For example, are they traveling for events, school holidays, or honeymoons?

Patterns will help you refine your personas into meaningful categories that can guide product offers and marketing strategies.

[Example] Building your fictional customer persona

Once you've gathered your data, it's time to identify trends. Let's walk through an example of how this works in action.

Imagine you’ve conducted surveys and interviews, and you've found a pattern: Many of your eSIM customers are North American women, aged 35-45, who travel with family during school holidays. They prioritize affordability and control over data usage while traveling.

In the next step, you'll meet Maggie, a persona built from this data.

Step 3: Create your persona

The classic output of customer persona research is to create a one-pager. This distills your findings into a clear, visual summary. Ina describes this step of the process that bridges the gap between data and human understanding as:

"You create personas from your key segments because that helps you empathize with them. You move from having this very cold segment data, to having something that looks more human." 

Your one-pager should include the following:

• Naming the persona: Humanizing your persona makes them more relatable.
• Defining their demographics: Gathering data on their age, location, job title, and other relevant demographic information.
• Outlining their motivations: Understanding what drives their purchasing decisions.
• Identifying their pain points: Pinpointing the challenges they face that your eSIM solution can address.

[Example] Introducing our fictional persona, Maggie.

From the data you sourced and trends you identified, you can now create a customer persona that looks similar to:

Maggie is a 42-year-old teacher from Seattle. She’s married with two kids, and her family travels during school holidays. Maggie is a budget-conscious traveler — she loves exploring new places but doesn’t want unexpected charges on her phone bill. She’s experienced the frustration of coming home to massive roaming fees, which makes her wary of using mobile data abroad. Now, she actively looks for affordable and flexible connectivity options before every trip.

What are the common mistakes businesses make when creating personas?

The goal is to always have a reasonable amount of data to back any claim you make about a customer persona. If you're making it up, you risk following the wrong road forward. 

Many businesses fall into these two common traps:

1. Prematurely excluding potential customer segments – Being too narrow too soon can cause you to overlook valuable market opportunities.
2. Relying on assumptions instead of data – Personas built on guesswork lead to wasted resources and misaligned marketing strategies.

Ina warns,

"The biggest mistake that folks make when creating personas is that they just imagine who this ideal customer would be without relying on actual evidence." This can lead to investing resources into targeting a customer segment that doesn't actually exist.

To stay on track, always ask:

• How do I know this?
• What data supports this assumption?
• Where’s the evidence?

A persona should always be backed by a reasonable amount of data. If you’re making it up, you risk heading in the wrong direction.

FAQs x eSIM customer persona

How often should I update my customer personas?

Customer preferences and behaviors evolve, so it's best to revisit and update your personas every 6-12 months. Analyze new data, market trends, and customer feedback regularly to ensure your personas remain relevant.

Can I have multiple customer personas for my eSIM business?

Absolutely! Many businesses cater to different types of travelers, such as budget-conscious tourists, digital nomads, and business travelers. Creating multiple personas ensures your marketing and product strategies address the unique needs of each segment.

What’s the best way to present customer personas to my team?

Create a visually engaging one-pager with key details like demographics, motivations, pain points, and behaviors. Use real customer quotes and images to make it relatable. Share it across departments to ensure alignment.