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Emotional Targeting: How to Create Content for Your Customers
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Marketing

Emotional Targeting: How to Create Content for Your Customers

Oreoluwa Akinnawo
Jun 24, 2024
3
min read

Humans are stimulus junkies, and are almost always looking for the next opportunity to have a new exciting experience. This concept has been used to craft some of the most powerful messages in the world of marketing today such as Nike’s “Just Do It” or McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it.

Nike uses emotional targeting to motivate website visitors to see themselves as athletes (Source: Nike)
“Hence, in order to have anything like a complete theory of human rationality, we have to understand what role emotion plays in it.” - H. Simon, 1983, Reason in Human Affairs

To optimize your digital assets, increase sign-ups, enhance user flow, or improve your product, consistently ask, “What’s in it for my customer?” and, “How do I pass the value of my product to my potential customers?”

Understanding how your customers think and catering to their emotional needs plays a massive role in optimizing your digital asset for conversions. In the world we live in today, we find that the motivation for people’s decisions are more emotional than logical. 

What Is Emotional Targeting?

Emotional Targeting is communicating to the target market using powerful emotional triggers. Emotional targeting helps you identify what changes to make for a better experience and higher revenues. Emotional targeting takes place on two levels: understanding the audience's emotional triggers and then implementing these insights on your website. Consumers benefit from emotional targeting too; they get a product which makes them feel good.

“For us to achieve our goals, we must first help our customers achieve theirs”. - Bryan Eisenberg

Source: Red Bull

To optimize your site successfully and grow your business with conversion optimization, you must first recognize that there is more to customers than just gender, age, and type of device & browser they use. 

Behind each device is a person, not just a hit, count, visitor, or user. 

How Emotions Influence Conversions

The better you understand how your customers make purchasing decisions the better of an experience you can give them which leads to more sales and higher conversions. It can be illustrated simply below:

  • Emotions affect Decisions
  • Decisions affect Conversions
  • Conversions affect Revenue

Case Study

We ran a post purchase survey for client, who gives profits on each sale to a charity, and found:

  • Customers are happy to make purchases because they know 100% of profits go to charitable causes.
  • Customers get satisfaction from being able to contribute to a social cause and still get a product they like in return.

From this, we were able to create a hypothesis based on the feedback of the survey – Adding a compelling copy above the CTA button could see an increase in Add to Cart interactions and Purchases.

Source: DFTBA Website

Consideration

Our reason for adding this piece of copy to the Product page and not anywhere else is because our funnel analysis shows that on the PDP category level, we observed the highest number of drop offs.

Results

This experiment ran for a period of 2 weeks and its performance is listed below:

  • Add to Cart = +8.5% uplift
  • Average order Value = +5.81%
  • Purchases = +29% uplift
  • Revenue = +36.5% uplift

Conclusion

What makes a piece of content compelling? The secret ingredient to compelling content is emotion.  It creates a certain level of trust which is virtually impossible to artificially manifest.
When you make an emotional connection with your audience, it is incredibly easy to steer them to the desired outcome. Once you form an emotional bond, however brief and fleeting, it makes your audience open to ideas and suggestions.

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