Emotion Sells & Magnifies Lead Conversions

We often think that people buy from us because they have carefully considered a set of rational reasons like the best Features, Top Quality, Best Aspect Available, Helpful Customer care, etc.

This is a wrong assumption!

The truth is that the majority of their decisions are rather based on the emotions they feel at that time.

The famous Portuguese-American neuroscientist well quotes it,

Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in decision-making.

So how do you design the marketing experiences for your target around those emotions? How do you motivate your target customers on an emotional level?

This week at Statusbrew, our team stopped by to share the insights on "How marketing that has emotions embedded magnifies sales and why?" We discussed:

• How Emotions play an important role in decision making?
• How can you magnify your lead conversions by using Emotional Intelligence?

Read on to discover all of the remarkable insights that were shared during the webinar!

But, before we start sharing how you can kick start with 'emotional marketing', let’s first start with a quick insight into what this term means.

What is Emotional Marketing?

Emotional marketing refers to marketing efforts that make use of strong emotions to help you connect with your audience in a human way. With consumers increasingly making buying decisions driven by sentiments instead of rationale, emotional marketing creates meaningful relationships that result in brand fans, replacing the brand loyalty marketing approach of years past.

Dove’s marketing is an excellent example of marketing with emotions! Their down-to-earth advertising center around guaranteeing each lady feels influencing their product to appear to be a wellspring of many feelings like acknowledgment, peacefulness, optimism, and self-love.

So now that you've known what emotional marketing is, let’s dive into how you can kick start with effective emotional marketing.

What's the state of awareness of your probable customers?

To begin with, figure out the state of awareness of your probable customers.
In short, when starting work on an emotional marketing project, ask yourself the question "What does my prospect already know?"

Your answer to this will tell you about:

• The type of lead and the information they need
• The way you should talk to the prospects
• The content you need to produce for promotion – that's most likely to generate the most significant response

There are 5 states that usually our leads are in:

• Most aware: These are the people who are most enthusiastic about your product, they trust your brand and may have even purchased from you in the past. Just show them the product and disclose to them the price, you don't have to clarify them more as they are already acquainted with you and your product.
• Product aware: These are the ones who recognize what you offer, yet haven't bought it. They're just not sure if your solution is best for them and are most probably comparing your product with that of a competitor to find the best deal. All you need to do is, push them a little to make them take a chance on you over a competitor
• Solution aware: These are the people who know their problem and also know the solution to it. You need to show the users in this awareness state that why your product is better than that of competitors.
• Problem aware: They are the ones who know what their problem is but are unaware of the solution. They are searching for help in tackling the issue.
• Unaware: Everyone else. They don’t have a problem and aren’t in need of a solution.

Once you discover to which awareness state does your prospect belong, it will become easier for you to know: What kind of content you need to produce? and What specific emotions you need to embed in your content to trigger the users into a buying mode?

Which emotions influence customer buying behaviours?

Emotional marketing is a powerful tool for triggering a purchase or two, and it helps people decide with their hearts.

Human emotion is based on four basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. Let’s learn about these emotions that could attract customers and boost sales:

1. Fear: Evoking fears enables your brand to be viewed as the one good thing in the world full of darkness, which means when the things get ugly, your customers will incline more toward you. The studies shows that fear prompts people to act through urgency and a desire for self-preservation.

   However, embedding this emotion into your marketing plan is not an easy task. If not used properly, it can have a negative impact on your brand. Thus it becomes important to use the emotion of fear in the right manner.

   For instance, The World Wildlife Fund is one brand known for its fear-inducing imagery.

   

2. Happiness: Happiness can have a powerful influence on choice, it is one of the critical drivers of decision making. The consumers want to be happy; thus there are chances that if you promise happiness, you will pull more consumers to your products.

   Positivity + Happy emotions have a capability of increasing engagement and shares.

   For instance, Android’s 'Friends Furever', is an excellent example of how powerful emotional marketing strategies can be when you add happiness to the mix.

3. Sadness: Sadness makes a brand empathize and connect. It is an emotion that inspires us to act and help people, which typically manifests in fiscal giving.

   Make your customers feel sad and then promise/offer them the solution to their negative feelings.

   MetLife Hong Kong is one such brand that is using the emotion of sadness to influence customer buying behaviors.

4. Anger: Most brands assume that it’s best to avoid anger, it is a negative emotion. But if used right, anger can wake people up and spur action. What happens when you see an injustice in the world? You want to do something about it and change it.

   For instance, Always’ Like a Girl campaign, uses a great/famous insult to grab your attention. This marketing campaign turned a phrase that had become an insult into an empowering message.

When one or more of the above-listed emotions are present inside the buyer's emotional state, a buying decision becomes certain.

How to ensure you’re building your Emotional Marketing Strategies around the right feelings?

To research the emotions required to close the sales or for understanding the emotional systems of your customers, utilize 'Limbic Model'. This model focus on the complex emotional personality structures of the consumers.

The Limbic model allows you to categorize a target customer segment by psychographic profile, rather than just demographics or geographics.

Delving further into the primary emotional systems, you’ll notice that there are seven defined Limbic® types based on the emotional values illustrated on the Limbic map.

Understanding your audience by Limbic type means that you can design marketing experiences that effectively resonate with this audience on an emotional level.

Once you have discovered all the data about the awareness state as well as the emotional state of your customer, fill in the following EMOTIONAL TARGETTING TEMPLATE

This framework will help you to design your emotional marketing strategy and present your product accordingly.

Tips for your Emotional Marketing Strategy!

Everyone considers themselves as rational creatures. However, the truth is that even the smallest decisions they make such as what to eat today, or what kind of movie to watch on Netflix are based on emotions.

Emotional marketing strategies, allows brands and companies to use the power of emotions to develop stronger connections with their customers.

Here are few tips that you could utilize while designing your emotional marketing strategy to make an impact on your audience:

1. You don't always have to make your customer feel warm

It's not always essential to make your customers feel warm and fuzzy. Sometimes you have to create a sense of urgency and push your customer to do something. Nobody ever wants to miss out on a great offer. This is why fear is one of the emotions that hugely influence the buying decisions.

For instance, when given too much time to make a choice, we continue delaying the things until the point when we disregard them. Whereas, if you give your clients a limited-time offer as 'Jabong' does, you reduce your risk of losing the sale.

2. Create content that is useful

One of the first rules of emotional marketing is to focus on creating content that’s useful, and that serves the needs of your audience. Consider the problems of your audience and think of ways you could solve those problems.

For instance, Red Bull is a company that has taken the world by storm by its useful/inspirational content.

3. Use user generated content to build trust

An incredible way to make your clients feel happy when they think about your brand is by using user-generated content in your emotional marketing efforts. Today, the majority of your clients are searching for signs that they can trust your company, and the products or services you’re offering. More than 92% of consumers think that UGC is useful when they’re making purchasing decisions.

4. Aspire your audience

Showing your clients that your values and theirs are aligned is an excellent way to bring more emotion to your marketing. It also helps to improve the impact of your brand. While you can demonstrate your shared vision, you can also bring your customer's dreams to life with aspirational campaigns. For instance, that’s exactly what Nike accomplished when they encouraged more people to achieve their own moment of greatness in a sport with their campaign “Find Your Greatness.“

Wrapping Up!

To sum up, emotion is the glue that binds brands and customers together. If it weren’t for the emotional appeal in marketing today, we’d all have a much harder time making purchasing decisions – whether we're investing in new marketing software or buying a pizza for lunch.

I hope you'll find all the information listed in this article to be useful to understand the emotional state your clients. Embedding the right emotional triggers in every aspect of customer experience can affect the buying decisions of your customers. If they can relate to your brand emotionally, they are probably going to buy from you!

*Update: If in case you missed our webinar, don’t worry! You can now access the full webinar recording here. Also, you can find the SlideShare of the webinar here.

What emotions do you use to affect the buying decisions of the people? Feel free to share your insights and ideas in the comments section below.