Consumers’ emotions greatly influence their transactional behavior. 70% of ’emotionally engaged’ consumers say they spend up to two times or more on brands they’re loyal to. While emotions can help you win wallet share and increase retention, forming a personal bond with consumers is tricky business. To avoid missteps, check out these five tips on forming a better emotional connections with your customers.
Give Customers A Sense of Belonging
While consumers are more technologically connected than ever before, they feel increasingly emotionally disconnected to their surroundings and the commercial noise. This void has led consumers towards brands that give them a sense of belonging. More than 65% of consumers feel emotionally connected to a brand that made them feel like they cared about people like themselves.
A couple of ways you can help consumers feel at home with your brand:
Create A Community: Build an online sharing community to connect with customers and strengthen interpersonal connections. Keep community members engaged by asking for their opinions on product updates, news, or relevant announcements, and encourage group participation. Use the virtual space to host conversations but consider leveraging physical assets as places for social meetups and further engagement.
Encourage Co-creation: Create opportunities for customers to influence innovation by enabling them to participate in product development. For example, Lego has an online community that allows members to submit their own design ideas for new sets.
For smooth co-creation, devise a clear strategy that effectively communicates any guidelines, rules, or necessary background information.
Promote Your Brand Values
64% of consumers are belief driven. Emphasize your brand values and how you differ from competitors to create long-lasting relationships with your customers. Focus on values that fit your brand identity, but also resonate with the modern customer. 70% of emotionally engaged consumers say that brand values such as social responsibility or eco friendliness are important to them. Here’s how to promote your values:
Highlighting Shared Values: Before committing to a brand, consumers must recognize any shared values. To create a personal relationship, find out which values resonate with customers and find opportunities for making a difference. Just stick to initiatives or causes that fit with your branding.
Commit to Your Values: Show customers you’re committed to upholding your values by living your purpose. This means incorporating these ideals into your workplace culture and business strategies.
Communicate Those Values: Display your brand’s values in places where customers can easily see them, such as on your website, advertising, or in within your content. When communicating your values, take a positive stance and avoid focusing on opposition.
Show Respect
Show customers you respect them and you’ll win their hearts. Treating your customers with respect can enhance their feelings of honesty, trust, and integrity towards your brand. Use the following tips to show consumers some respect:
Demonstrate Transparency: Offer consumers insights into the inner workings of your brands, such as how you source products and your environmental impact. You can also demonstrate transparency by enabling customers to track your supply chain, owning up to your mistakes, and taking steps to correct them, and using a transparent pricing model.
Luxury accessories label Oliver Cabell, uses a transparent pricing model on its website, that shows customers production costs and provides exact details of what the cost covers.
Deliver On Your Promise: Breaking your brand promise is a fast way to show customers that you don’t respect them. To consistently live up to your values, equip your employees with the tools they need to provide an emotionally satisfying customer experience at each touch point. Additionally, create standards that operationalize your brand promise and collect customer feedbacks.
Provide Fast Support: Show customers you value their time by quickly attending to and resolving their complaints. 9 in 10 emotionally engaged consumers want real-time responses and speedy resolution. Empower frontline staff with a 360-degree view of your customers to help them respond to queries in real time, resolve issues during first contact, and go above and beyond for to meet their needs. Keep up to date proactive customer service platforms like FAQs and knowledge forums up to date as well.
Recognition
Recognizing customers makes them feel special and creates an emotional connection that can lead to more sales. 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands recognize, remember, and provide them and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations. Beyond welcoming them with a smile and addressing them by their first name, we gathered a few tips that’ll show your shoppers that they matter:
Curate The Right Products: 48% of consumersleft a business’ website and made a purchase on another site or store because it was poorly curated. Combine human intuition with algorithms to help you curate the right products for customers and deliver a pleasant customer experience. Help customers discover interesting products by filtering product catalogs down to browseable collections and make items easy to find. Canopy lists only one price and a link to Amazon in order to make the shopping experince simple and predictable.
Personalize Your Website: If you haven’t already, upgrade your site by creating a customer journey map to learn how they make their way through your website and identify opportunities for personalization. Then, use this data to adjust website content in real-time based on the customer’s preferences, browsing behavior, location, purchasing history, etc.
Provide Relevant Offers: For relevant offers, use a recommendation engine that can analyze user preferences, continuously updates with new data, and make suggestions based on online activity.
Give Out Rewards
Rewarding your customers produces positive outcomes for you too; they’ll feel appreciated, grateful, valued, and more willing to spend on your brand. A couple of tips when using rewards to build an emotional connection:
Surprise and Delight: Give unexpected rewards to make customers feel special. When designing this strategy, tie your surprise into a business goal and determine the target audience that’ll earn the most traction from your initiative.
Give Experiential Loyalty Rewards: Leverage customer insights to understand what your customers value and use that knowledge to drive your reward design. You can give experiential rewards to all your customers or only high-level customers depending on your business goals.
Make Your Customers Catch Feelings
As retail becomes increasingly competitive, emotional connections are crucial for remaining in business. To successfully connect with your customers, know your segments and what motivates them. Measure performance using metrics that gauge intent, sentiment, and perceptions, like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Sentiment scores to navigate this often-tricky two-way street.
