Every decision that every customer makes when completing the consumer journey involves a huge number of conscious and subconscious decisions; the important thing to do as a salesperson is to tap into this and influence their decision making processes with your acute understanding of human psychology and behaviour.
One of the best ways to do this is by influencing customer emotions. Everyone has the same emotional patterns and triggers to a large extent, so understanding how emotive marketing can be used can have a real beneficial effect on your profits.
1. Tapping Into Fundamental Emotions
Direct appeals to emotions are likely to be the most obvious, but also the most effective ways of influencing consumers. By affecting the most basic human emotions, such as happiness, sadness or fear, you can get the response you want. For example, charities looking for donations for starving children make direct appeals, making you feel sad for those in a worse position than you, and therefore receive more donations.
By understanding how your target market should feel in relation to your product (for example, safer, refreshed or relaxed), you can more effectively target these specific emotions and produce a response that drives sales.
Equally, while you may relate positive emotions to your products, you can equally discuss competitors’ products in relation to negative emotions, making it more likely the customer will stick with your brand.
2. Emotive Language
It’s not just direct appeals to the emotions that influence consumer choices, but it is the way you say things or the way things are written that also help to influence overall emotions in marketing.
Using superlative language will help to consolidate direct emotional appeals, as well as energise your marketing campaign. Consider adding words such as ‘the best’, ‘stunning’, ‘amazing’ and ‘highest quality’, to really show your consumers that your products and services are right for them.
3. Using First Or Third Person?
While the use of the first or third person (that is I and we or she/he/it and them) will depend upon your broader marketing campaigns, and consistency within emotive marketing is key as it helps the messages and content to flow, the vast majority of businesses prefer to use I and we. The use of first person allows them to gain a personal connection with the customer, and the customers feel far more emotionally connected, and therefore invested, in the advert, resulting in them being more likely to buy.
4. The Psychology Of Colour
Despite still not being fully understood, the psychology of colour is really becoming a key part of marketing and website design. Research has shown that colours are inherently connected with thoughts, feelings and emotions within the human brain, so the correct use of can be used to influence a potential customer’s emotions, and convince them to buy, due to the associations they have with the colour scheme.
As bold and vivid colours are usually associated with danger, designers looking to tap into emotions in a subtler way suggest using pastel tones to convey messages of peace and relaxation, allowing your customer to naturally associate these positive emotions with your product and services.
Using these four factors in conjunction with each other should really help you to influence your customers’ emotions. When done correctly, you should see conversion and sales figures rise, resulting in increased revenue and profits – a goal everyone aspires to.
