Recent research on consumer neuroscience explains the impact of consumer’s emotions on the effectiveness of advertising or customer interaction.
It explains in detail how deeply the advertisement content or different modes of customer connections influence the emotional response of the consumer and their decision making.
The study also reveals that the customers having positive emotions for certain brands are more likely to be loyal. In fact, the emotional level of the customers is a significant determining factor than customer satisfaction metrics.
So, how to delight customers on an emotional level? Keep on reading to know more.
1. Provide Incentives and Rewards
As per the survey, 75% of consumers say they prefer companies that offer rewards. In the above section, you learned how to value your customers by wishing and rewarding them. However, the rewards and gifts shouldn’t be limited to occasions only.
Many businesses offer free memberships and loyalty cards to their regular customers. Also, some of them offer special discounts to new customers.
Such reward programs and incentives profoundly influence a customer’s view of your business emotionally and they continue buying from you.
For happy customers, keep rewarding them from time to time. Recognize their loyalty by offering incentives and bonuses and make them feel important for your business.
2. Create Memes
Among various social media marketing techniques, meme stands out because of the way it can connect with the customers. Memes are made funny or sarcastic, which makes them grab the audience’s attention effortlessly. Moreover, they are easy to consume, share, and relate to your audience.
You can use them to your advantage as long as you do it in a smart or clever way. Your focus should be on selecting the right images that tie into your branding or your company in some way and then add texts with clever, witty, or funny elements to help your meme go viral.
The easiest way to create memes is using a meme generator tool. There are several tools available, offering all-time popular or trending meme base images for instant use. You can find one of your choices, add text to it, and it is ready to post. For instance, InVideo offers a free meme generator tool to make memes that stand out.
If you have a designing team or you are a photoshop expert, then you can create your own watermark of your brand and add it to the meme for your own branding.
3. Use Live Chat
Emailing for customer queries is a thing of the past. Today, around 67% of B2C businesses use live chat for customer support and 73% to 81% of customers are fully satisfied. The reason is simple, using this channel customers can quickly get into conversation with the team and find their answers.
Customers love live chat support also because they can get their answers from a live person while in the middle of an online purchase. Interacting with a person or even a bot during purchase, makes customers feel confident and more connected with the platform. This simple step creates an emotional bond and encourages prospects to convert into loyal customers.
Live chat software has another benefit of keeping a record of a full conversation history at all times with your customers. You can use a software like Zendesk Live Chat that offers live chats in real-time and ongoing conversations along with the entire chat history with the online customer.
4. Use a CRM Tool
Customers create bonds with companies they trust and the trust is built when a company cares for its consumers. Apart from simply focusing on sales, you must also strengthen the customer relationship, which you can do using a CRM tool.
CRM tools can do wonders for your business, especially when integrated with a unified communications platform. Doing so will help you gather all the messages from emails, chats, SMS, and voice calls in one spot. Hence, you will have all the required data to improve internal and external communications.
In fact, you can use the data to deliver a tailored experience. For example, you can wish consumers on their birthdays or wedding anniversary and offer them a small discount as a gift.
Software like EngageBay help you get a complete view of every interaction you had with the lead. So, you have a customer history in front of you before you approach them to promote your product or to easily handle any issue they come with. In short, CRM tools speed up the response time.
5. Engage with Customers
In order to build a bond with your customers, you need to get them to engage with you. Instead of posting ads as everyone does, shout out to them, engage with them, and encourage them to visit your website.
Thankfully, there are several platforms to do so, especially social media platforms. Networks like Instagram and Facebook can exhibit your brand to a broader audience and allow them to connect with the brand emotionally.
As discussed above, a meme is an effective way of putting an impression but is not the same as engaging customers. Let us see what you can do to catch attention:
- Ask them to share their stories using interactive Instagram stickers
- Tell your customers to drop a comment on the posts
- Campaign fun competitions, like post a selfie with our new product and win another one for free.
- Create engaging Instagram reels.
- Go for a live chat on Instagram.
When customers contribute to your existence, they are tied with the brand emotionally. Plus, it initiates brand awareness, boosts goodwill, and increases eCommerce growth.
6. Value Customers’ Special Days
If you want to touch your shoppers’ emotions, what could be better than enhancing the joy of their special occasions? If you are already using CRM software, you would surely have customer data.
If not, then you can collect the data to wish them on special occasions and add a gift to their orders or offer them an exclusive discount coupon.
This way the customer would know that you value them and remember them. Keep on looking for opportunities to make them feel how important they are for you.
Summary
With the growing retail industry, holding on to the existing customers while attracting new ones is becoming increasingly difficult. Prioritizing the emotional side of the consumer in customer communication has emerged as a solution to raise their loyalty bar. Hence, mental representation of the product is preferred to be richer in emotional content than simply featuring the product attributes.
Broadly, emotion is a vital player in delighting the modern customer. The above tips are some of the proven techniques you can use for business in any industry. Hopefully, the article has successfully guided you to inject emotion into your marketing strategies and customer handling.
About the Author
Mark Walden is a financial writer and entrepreneur. He is also an investment analyst. He is focusing on stock, forex, alternative investment and structured finance. As a content creator he has helped establish the voice and brand for companies such as TRADERSCAP which is providing managed account service worldwide. In his leisure, he loves to travel around the world.
