Emotional Marketing: How To Make Your Customers Buy On Impulse

What’s emotional marketing? We use this term to describe marketing and advertising activities that generally use emotion to make a business’ audience notice, remember, share, and buy their products. Emotional marketing efforts are usually focused on one main emotion, like happiness or sadness, to trigger a consumer response.

In today’s fast-changing world, understanding consumer behavior is more than a necessity. Every decision your buyer makes consists of several conscious and subconscious emotional triggers. We get used to thinking of ourselves as rational and logical people. The truth is, we are slaves to emotion. As psychologists put it, people think second and feel first.

Knowledge of emotional marketing basics will let you take your sales to the next level. Moreover, understanding how to use the power of emotions will help you make unique content and stand out from your competitors.

So, if you are eager to learn more about using emotional marketing to promote your dropshipping store on Facebook, this is the article for you! Let’s figure it all out!

Why is emotional marketing so effective?

When you make an emotional connection with your audience, it’s incredibly easy to steer them to the desired outcome.

You’ve formed an emotional bond, however brief and fleeting, that makes them open to ideas and suggestions. It creates a certain level of trust that’s virtually impossible to achieve in any other way.

Here are the main advantages your business gets from emotional marketing:

• You become more memorable

When you make an emotional impact on your audience, your brand and your content sticks in their hearts and minds.

• Your content becomes more shareable

People love to share stories or things, especially if they trigger some emotional response from them, whether a good or a bad one. It’s just human nature.

• It influences purchasing decisions

In a dedicated study, 31% of emotionally charged ads and only 16% of rationally motivated ads turned out to be successful. Clearly, an emotional response to an ad can influence the viewers’ intent to make a purchase.

• It helps building customer loyalty and attracting brand advocates

Another study shows that customers who have an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value. Besides, 71% of them are likely to recommend the company, which is significantly higher than the average 45%. Therefore, when customers connect to you emotionally, they’ll reward you with their loyalty and advocacy.

Emotions and their effects on customers

Let’s look at the ways to use the core emotions to influence consumers’ decisions!

Joy

Joy is a positive emotion. When triggered, it stimulates people to take positive action such as sharing, for example.

Ads and promo campaigns often focus on joy and happiness to improve customer relationships. Thanks to them, you create a much deeper connection with your audience. Videos or photos of cute babies or animals have a great tendency to go viral because they elicit a positive response.

Happiness makes us share … and sharing leads to increased brand awareness. If bad news sells, then good news travels fast. Studies show that good news and positive content spreads faster on social media than any other type of content. This phenomenon isn’t unlike the “social smile” in infancy when babies reciprocate a smile. When someone is happy, we tend to mirror that emotion, which leads us to share any content that made us smile in the first place.

Sadness

Many brands try to create an emotional connection with their customers based on sadness.

Sadness is a very strong emotion. A 2011 study showed that feeling sad (followed with feeling better!) can be motivating and action-inspiring. People with an altruistic impulse caused by sadness are often very generous.

Sadness brings people together for support and empathy, so statistics show that sad content often gets more clicks than positively charged content. You should not always use sadness as a promotion driver for your store, but still, this tactic can occasionally be used to attract more potential customers.

Fear

Fear is a primal emotion that marketers use to inspire a change. Appeals to fear are impactful, but they need to be used carefully. If these messages are too intense or harshly presented, they can backfire and cause a negative response sometimes. One reason for this is that people tend to avoid unpleasant or upsetting imagery.

Still, fear is motivating because we are biologically programmed to run from scary situations. Our bodies and minds compel us to act when we face fear-inducing things.

In marketing, you can illustrate a vivid threat and then offer viewers the way to escape it.

Anger

Anger is a contradictory emotion. Many companies are afraid to use this emotion in their advertising campaigns. This is not always reasonable, though: in the right circumstances, anger can have a powerful effect. Anger makes people act, and all this is due to the fact that such a bright emotion makes people stand up for justice or fight with a problem that bothers them. People do not like unpleasant emotions, so they will do everything to avoid them.

Belonging

Feeling alone is one of the worst feelings in the world and no one wants to experience this feeling.

It’s in our human nature to long for intimacy, strong bonds, and the security of being part of a group. The feeling of belongingness is one of our most basic needs that motivate our behavior.

It’s because of this many brands form communities, online and offline, where their members connect with each other.

In addition, you can try to use user-generated content, as it helps people feel recognized and appreciated when their favorite brands share their content.

Emotional Marketing Strategies

Utilizing various emotions, you can market your business in a variety of ways. We’ve prepared a list of strategies you can combine to stimulate the emotions of your customers.

• Find a way to understand your audience 

Accomplishing this is an important step, before any kind of advertising, especially emotional advertising.

If you know your audience, you can easily build-up your strategy knowing what kind of content they’ll respond best to. Moreover, what emotion generates the most valuable response for you, as well.

Before choosing what emotions to include in your strategy, make sure to conduct some research about your audience. This will help you make better marketing decisions and save you precious time and resources.

• The choice of color

Choosing a color holds much more value than you might think at first. Color and emotion are very closely related, in more ways than you may think.

Color plays a big role in evoking emotions.

You know that feeling when you walk in a room and start feeling a certain emotion. This is called color psychology, and many businesses utilize this in their business strategies.

For example, therapists color their offices to have a calming effect on the patients, sports teams choose colors that excite the fans and audiences, movie studios design their posters to elicit a specter of different emotions through colors.

And the same goes for all major brands. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Google, Samsung, Instagram, etc., all these brands have distinctive color combinations that elicit different emotions and make them more memorable and appealing.

• Inspiration

The feeling of inspiration brings out many positive emotions like elation, joy, excitement, and hope just to name a few.

Marketing campaigns are especially powerful because they tap into a dream, goal, or vision that your audience tries to accomplish. However, to successfully fulfill this type of strategy, businesses need to understand how their product helps reach those dreams.

How to become a master of emotional marketing?

Every marketing strategy has its own rules and subtleties. Emotional marketing is no exception. It is based on the power of five. Read the following tips and use emotions in ads correctly to avoid hurting your customers’ feelings.

The power of understanding

It’s about an emotional connection. To touch the hearts of your potential customers, it is important to know them on an emotional level. Do they worry about something? What are they afraid of? How can you make them feel happy? You can get these insights from your previous advertising campaigns. If you don’t have such data, you should think about advertising strategies that will help you understand your audience better.

The power of story

Once you know your audience, you can use these informational details to create a story that resonates with your customers. The story should contain 5 main elements: character, setting, plot, conflict, and theme.

Stories that teach or encourage, inspire empathy, or evoke vivid positive emotions are the key to great engagement. People like to be involved in something, especially if it brings them pleasant impressions. A good emotional connection with your customers will lead to an increase in your sales.

The power of color

Don’t underestimate the power of color and design. As you know, color can have an emotional impact on people. Green and blue have a calming effect, purple, in turn, is associated with wealth and refinement, and red is quite contradictory as it can both show strength and passion, and at the same time, be scary. You can use this information to increase the impact of advertising on your potential customers.

The power of sincerity

Be careful when using emotional marketing. When connecting with your audience, keep in mind that it should be based on the true values of your brand. Otherwise, pretending can play a cruel joke on you. The audience feels when it is being cheated. Build your brand only on sincerity and honesty.

The power of feelings

Emotional marketing may seem complicated, but it’s not. We are all human beings and we all feel emotions. The main thing is to test your audience and understand what emotions you can use when creating content to get the greatest benefit. Don’t be afraid to use different types of emotions, so you can accurately analyze your audience and create content that will touch your potential customers on an emotional level.

How to measure emotional marketing

Generally, in terms of measurement, emotional marketing is similar to traditional marketing efforts. So, here are a few things you can do to measure your emotional marketing efforts.

• Analyze current metrics

Measuring marketing efforts usually requires identifying trends. To notice a trend, record all the current metrics of your business, such as page views, click-through rate, subscriptions, opened emails and purchases.

Based on what emotions you want to target and what you hope to achieve, you may find various figures.

• Conduct research before launch

If you want to keep tabs on what your competitors are doing and how their customers are responding, you must conduct research.

Additionally, watch out for businesses outside of your niche, as they can also provide great examples of the emotion you want to target.

• Set goals

You can set your goals similarly to traditional marketing for more clocks, subscriptions, or more subjective ones, like hoping to receive more personal messages. Certain emotions can influence customers in different ways.

If you target happy emotions, this might trigger more shares, while sharing something surprising can cause more brand loyalty through email subscriptions

• Use marketing tools

Use tools like search analytics and email tracking to see if there is an increase in your metrics. This way you’ll determine how effective your emotional marketing is and if you’re achieving the goals you’ve set.

Summing up emotional marketing

Using the principles of emotional marketing for your ads and content will directly affect the purchasing process of potential customers. It is often said that people buy emotionally and then justify their purchases logically. Now you know how to use it effectively in your dropshipping business promotion.

It doesn’t matter what emotion you choose: happiness, fear, anger, or sadness – the general message should resonate with the target audience of your dropshipping store. Each of the emotions outlined above will make a noticeable difference to your conversions. Don’t forget to provide enough information about your products. It can increase the chance of purchase enormously.

It’s essential to keep honesty and integrity as a priority. You should be ethical using emotional marketing instruments and care about your customers’ comfort.

Are you using emotional marketing techniques to promote your dropshipping store? You are kindly welcome to share your experience in the comments below!