The Human Touch: Marketers' Journey to Emotional Connection

Ethical data-driven insights are the key to unlocking the “why” behind consumer motivations. But first, brands must understand the emotional stimulus behind these drivers in order to deliver authentic experiences that cultivate long-lasting customer loyalty, says, John Baudino, GM Digital Data & Indirect Sales, Acxiom

Emotion is a powerful driver of human behavior. In today’s omnichannel marketing world, outstanding customer experience that evokes the desired sentiment across all online and offline touchpoints is the Holy Grail for brands. However, the path to customer loyalty can be elusive, and the goalposts continually move.

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

Download

Customers want to trust the brands they love, but their savvy skepticism means marketers have to ensure every engagement with the brand is authentic and personalized. Unforgettable product and service experiences breed loyalty and drive revenue. Brands that establish and maintain strong bonds with their audiences are the ones that succeed.

There are three imperatives for marketers seeking to establish and sustain valuable emotional connections with their customers: tap into emotional motivators, optimize customer journeys and understand the data. 

Emotional Matters

Marketers realize that emotional connectivity matters more than customer satisfaction. According to Motista, customers who feel a genuine emotional connection with a brand tend to be true brand advocates and have a higher lifetime value. Harvard Business Review research showed it’s possible “to rigorously measure and strategically target the feelings that drive customers’ behavior”—factors known as emotional motivators, which are instrumental in instilling brand loyalty.  

In order to tap into these emotional motivators, brands must ensure they understand what drives their customers’ behaviors. This may entail conducting research, utilizing ethically sourced data and analyzing previous customer engagements. Since consumers are motivated in so many different ways, brands must put people at the center of the process and activate available data to gain insight into these motivators. Messages and approaches that trigger these motivations can then be incorporated into the customer journey, personalizing each engagement across every platform.

It’s All About the (Customer) Journey

Delivering a consistent, personalized experience for consumers across all channels and devices is crucial but can be challenging. With multiple touchpoints, it’s easier than ever to confuse customers with muddled brand messages.  Within this customer, journey lies the opportunity to develop an emotional connection that improves brand loyalty and lifetime value.

In order to build emotional connections, every aspect of the customer interaction with the company, its products and services, on and offline, must reflect a consistent messaging framework. Mining for moments of authenticity and personalization at every turn help instill trust in the brand. At its core, emotional connectivity is a marketing approach that recognizes and reaches real people with messages that truly matter to them.

Understanding the various aspects of purchasing behavior can be multifarious. We don’t just want to know what customers are doing but why they are doing it. Today, there is more data available than ever before. Knowing how to draw insights from data empowers brands to deliver real-time contextualized experiences. By using this data in an ethical and privacy-compliant manner, companies provide value to and build trust with consumers, driving business results.

The How and Why

Emotion can be used to connect with brands and with products and services. While brands typically focus on a few key emotions they want to elicit, there are nuances that influence buying decisions. Take, for example, how and why people choose to buy new tires.  Vehicle safety, vehicle performance, fuel efficiency— each of these factors will resonate with different consumers and align with certain emotions. The best marketers not only understand this, but activate campaigns that speak distinctly to these different motivators.

Understanding “why” consumers do what they do can be elusive, and sometimes consumers themselves can’t specify what spurs them to act. Accurately connecting data points to help pinpoint consumers’ motivation enables true people-based targeting, measurement, and personalization. Data-driven insights can reveal what consumers are saying with their behavior, in order to create actionable insights.  

Gathering data from multiple sources and touch points and creating a unified data layer will help tell the true story of the why and how they pertain to consumer behavior. If safety is what a person is looking for when purchasing tires, then relevant and tailored safety messaging must be delivered, encouraging purchase behavior and reinforcing positive feelings about the brand.

Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

Today, more than at any time in history, the intersection between data and technology is part of our day-to-day life. The explosion of data sources can provide brands with invaluable insight, but marketers must work ethically and stop to consider the difference between what they can do and what they should do. It’s important to follow a rigorous and effective data governance framework that encompasses what is just, in order to prevent individual harms and be beneficial to consumers. As in any relationship, business or otherwise, trust needs to be earned, sustained and nurtured over time.

The path to emotional connectivity can be a complex and winding road, but when navigated ethically and strategically can create value for both brands and consumers. Understanding and utilizing emotional motivators are vital to creating authentic connections that can lead to trust, loyalty and a mutually beneficial relationship.