Building a strategy around stimulating your audience’s emotional side has a name — it’s called emotional branding, and it’s been around for quite a while. The essential idea behind this type of marketing is that your customers and your prospects are exposed to marketing campaigns that are in sync with their emotional profile. By establishing a strong emotional bond with your customers is a valuable asset to any business.
When applied correctly, this strategy will let you build customer loyalty and engagement, which will eventually result in higher profits. A client’s relationship with a particular product is mainly defined by their emotional “relationship” with the brand and not necessarily cold facts. This is an essential principle that drives brand devotion.
1) Design email campaigns that suit your clients
First off, you’ll need to do some proper segmenting of your mailing lists. Although all your clients are equal, they have different behavior patterns and make different choices. Being able to distinguish between various groups of customers will let you craft email marketing campaigns that are designed for customers with specific behavior patterns. This will let you build trust and increase retention rates.
Typically you’ll have to take take the following factors into account when designing a segmented email campaign:
Demographics
Creating a classification of your audience or client base based on their gender, age, and country/city will significantly contribute to the tailoring of your email campaigns. This will eventually ensure a more efficient and cost-effective marketing campaign. Furthermore, different people respond to emotional cues differently. Make sure you don’t pile everyone in the same group; instead, craft a message for each group of people.
Purchases
Having a clear understanding of how often your customers make purchases with you will also let you target them more efficiently. If, for instance, there is a group of customers that have only made one purchase within the last year, consider sending them an encouragement campaign, which will provide them with a special discount.
Contribution
If you have a referral program, or something similar to it, make sure you say “thank you” to the people that have contributed. The people that have eagerly participated in the referral program deserve a sort of reward. Acknowledging that their contribution is essential to your brand will make them feel appreciated for their dedication. This will only fuel loyalty and further engagement.
3) What you say and how you say it
Knowing how to word an email message isn’t as straightforward as it may seem, and it’s most certainly easier to trigger an adverse reaction than a positive one. Especially when you’re sending an email. Written text is a very tricky medium. It isn’t evident to the reader if you’re saying something with a good intention or a bad one, or maybe you’ve worded your message slightly ambiguously.
There are a few things you should always take into account in order to stimulate an emotional response from your audience:
Address your customers by their names
Using your customer’s name will establish an emotional connection between them and your business. Include a section in your newsletter registration form where your customer can indicate how he prefers to be called.
Don’t be afraid to be personal
Don’t forget to mention your own name and the name of your company. Lots of successful businesses have adopted this way of opening newsletter emails.
“Hey, {{username}}, I’m Jayden from XYZ! Just wanted to reach out and say that…”
This is a way more personal email that is just exposing your customers to some “salesy” gibberish. When you’re being so personal, a customer feels like he’s a valuable asset to the company and that he’s in direct contact with the company he supports.
Word it properly
Make sure that your tone is always positive when wording an email for your customers. Whatever’s going on in your business or life shouldn’t be reflected in your communication with your clients. Refrain from using negative that compel your clients to close the email and move on to other service providers or retailers.
3) Use a welcoming design
However, it is essential to understand that emotional responses in emails aren’t triggered exclusively by text. It takes a great design to get the job done. Dedicate some time to research and testing the best colors, layouts, and other variables in your email campaigns.
High-quality branding demands many hours of hard work. Once done right, you’ll be able to establish a strong connection with your audience.
- Invest in design – An elegantly crafted email will skyrocket your chances of impressing your customers, along with actually creating the emotional bond you are looking for. Always perform thorough tests and check if the layout of your emails is identical on all devices and operating systems.
- Eye-candy content – It’s pretty much predictable that a mediocre-looking email with poorly taken pictures won’t be able to impress anyone. It’s essential that you integrate high-quality images into your emails, which will help your cause.
- Build up some anticipation – Consistency throughout your email campaigns regarding providing customers with highly valuable content will build a sense of anticipation even before a newly arrived email is opened. When your audience can’t wait to check out your new message due to how valuable and well-designed it is, you know that you’re on the right path toward loyalty and engagement.
- Don’t be bland – Of course, your primary goal is to maintain an informative and educational tone throughout your campaigns, but don’t forget that being knowledgeable about specific topics doesn’t make you emotionally stimulating per se. Ease up the mood of your content with an occasional joke.
- Don’t be predictable – Do something odd once in a while. Let your audience sense that they don’t really know what to expect from the next newsletter, but they’re still eager to find out.
Conclusion
Once your brand has a loyal following, you’ll be able to build a community of like-minded people who will be fond of your service but also regularly contribute to its improvement. By using the steps mentioned above, you’ll be able to stimulate and build loyalty and regular engagement even with the less proactive customers.
Enough talking – start writing!
Kristin Savage graduated from Columbia University, where she majored in Germanic Languages. Besides English as her mother tongue, she also speaks German and Dutch fluently. Kristin is currently studying Spanish and has plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics. Her interest lies in applying her practical knowledge of language processes to everyday life. She has been a writer at Pick Writers for a few years and is known for her thorough approach to all the tasks and aspiration to fulfill assignments with flying colors.
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