Logic, discounted prices, good quality at cheap rates are some tricks that you often use to sell your product. It might help to an extent, but it is doomed to backfire as such tricks do not yield long-term customer loyalty.

Research backs this as well. It suggests that marketing that stands on the pillars of logic and reason misses the substantial ingredient of emotions. Consequently, it does not seal a secure future deal for the business.

Emotions are elements that motivate decision making. These also help in forging a strong connection with your audience. Research by Pringle & Field reveals that emotional campaigns outsail most of the other metrics. These include share gain, revenue, and profit.

More studies also indicate that emotions play a powerful and persuasive role in influencing decision making.

All this translates into the significance of tapping into the sentiments of your target market.

Brands are also increasingly utilizing emotional targeting for marketing their products. Examples of these include Yves Saint Laurent and Garnier that are smooth sailing into the water of emotional targeting.

Emotional targeting is steadily gaining traction. At the same time, it poses several benefits that outnumber a logic-based online marketing strategy. Both these factors allow greater penetration of this approach as the new face of online marketing in 2018.

Here is an in-depth look at pointers that contribute to such a position of emotional targeting:

Neuroscience Supports Emotional Targeting 

Emotions assist one in calling the shots, which means these are also helpful in allowing a person to click the ‘order’ button. A study conducted by a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio proves this. It demonstrates that emotions play a substantial role in helping make decisions.

In his research work, the neuroscientist studied participants who had brain damage, which prevented them from harboring emotions. All the subjects behaved normally in all the ways except one: they couldn’t make decisions. The participants were able to logically explain what they should do. However, they still couldn’t make a single simple decision such as choosing between a sandwich or pasta.

This highlights the role of emotions in decision-making, providing a strong scientific base for emotional targeting. So, when businesses make use of logic as their chief marketing tool, they miss the golden opportunity of binging on emotions. Because the customer will make an emotional call at the end of the day.

Creates Memorable Experiences 

Marketing tools and A/B Testing are good for business growth, but emotional targeting is equally important. Targeting emotions is an efficient way to weave your brand’s shopping experience with the customers’ memorable life events.

Scott Button, CEO of Unruly points out, “In today’s frenetic, cluttered media landscape, brands that want success on social media and memorability at the point of purchase need to create and distribute contagious content that makes a deep emotional connection with their audience.”

A case in point is Hershey’s #HelloHappy campaign. Chocolate is linked with joy, which is how Hershey’s used it in their campaign:

In this regard, the senior brand manager at Hershey’s, Stacie Stauffer revealed to AdWeek that Hershey’s aimed to tap into the emotional reserves of its target audience. In doing so, it was attempting to make Hershey’s synonymous with happiness.

As Stauffer outlined:

“The second you say ‘Hershey,’ the most amazing thing happens. This giant flood of emotions and memories happens—when I made s’mores camping, or stirred up chocolate milk with my mom. That solidified that we should be speaking more as [one] brand, and from a much more emotional place.”

This shows that emotional targeting can sow seeds of permanent loyalty for your business by creating memories.

It’s a Productive Strategy 

Emotional targeting helps boost sales, increases customers’ purchase intent, grabs more attention to the business, and gets more media coverage.

Emotional targeting nurtures psychological triggers that encourage purchase. It enables marketers to capture the customer in the most appropriate mood, delivering the appropriate message with an emotional context. Therefore, emotional targeting can optimize ROI and brand recall.

In this regard, Neil Patel tells:

“When your content drives people to a state of happiness or joy, they will automatically respond to your offers, feel obliged to share your content, and will stop at nothing to tell others about you.”

This elucidates that content generation like that at Setalks is not restricted to merely the churning of words.

An emotional approach to marketing also enhances the purchase intent. When Coca-Cola switched its tagline to “Taste the feeling” from “Open Happiness,” it continued focusing on happy images of engaging with others. This is evident in the post by Coca-Cola below that captures happy faces having the soft drink with friends.

As per the Unruly ShareRank data, a video centered around intense emotions culminated in the favorable odds of 70% of viewers buying the product. In such a case, the video elicited an emotional response from more than 30% viewers and an overall uplift of nearly 144%.

Moreover, marketing tactics that tickle the emotional centers of the target audience also get increased attention.

Research confirms that emotional ads are 84% more effective than informative or rational ones. A report by Fractl campaigns also paints a similar picture. It found that campaigns that secured 100 plus placements tended to showcase 3 times powerful emotional engagement. This was relative to campaigns that achieved little.

The report also highlighted that such emotion-based blueprints earned more media coverage. Campaigns that got 20,000 social shares were 8 times more likely to have a strong emotional bait than campaigns that got 1000 shares. The report ended up marking emotions as the differentiating key for lucrative campaigns.

Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science, also holds the same view. She outlines that videos which evoke genuine emotions pose two times the increased odds of getting social media shares than those that excite a weak emotional response.

A case in point is Dove that has been gaining online momentum on account of its emotional campaigns.

Evidence for the success comes from statistics that show that the video by the brand as part of its #wearebeautiful campaign was viewed 27 million times in about ten days of its release.

Likewise, New Balance made use of emotional targeting to enhance brand awareness in Japan. It created a video that exhibited emotional receptivity signals. The results showed a 135% increase in awareness; speaking volumes of the effectiveness of this marketing technique.

Key Takeaway 

In short, studies point out that channeling the target audience’s emotions brushes up the conversion rate.

More research concludes that a fruitful business strategy orbits around crafting emotional connections. Emotional targeting improves brand recall, sales, purchase intent, and ROI among other things. Additionally, businesses that are adopting an emotional tone in their marketing skillset are all exhibiting bright outcomes.

Therefore, owing to the success it yields, the productivity it provides, and the extensive research that backs it, it can be confirmed that emotional targeting is indeed the new face of online marketing.

About the Author:

Alma Causey is a Freelance writer by day and sports fan by night. She writes about tech education and health related issues. Live simply, give generously, watch football and a technology lover.

 

An Ikea advertisement shows a mother and son (about 9 or 10 years old) going into an Ikea store where the son seems to expertly choose furniture pieces. They eventually make their purchase, load the furniture in the truck, and in the next scene, a young gentleman is seen telling his mother, “Mum, I’m only moving around the corner.”

In another advertisement, this one for Red Barn Furniture Outlet, the narrator can be heard describing the wide selection of the company’s products and the benefits or advantages of their products. At the same time, pictures of these products are shown on the screen:

Completely Different Approaches To Sell Products

These two advertisements obviously use two different approaches to promoting the company’s products. They also illicit different types of emotions from the viewer.

Watching the Ikea commercial brings about an ”aww-like” reaction from the viewer, because the ad clearly depicts how much the mother loves his son and how the Ikea products are used to show that love.

It leaves the viewer feeling positive (happy, inspired, and peaceful), and the advertisement’s ending was also pleasantly surprising and is likely to bring about a smile from the viewer.

On the other hand, the Red Barn Furniture Outlet commercial doesn’t really illicit much emotions from the viewer.

Yes, the viewer is informed about the company, but this is no different from how other furniture companies promote their products. It comes off as sort of generic and doesn’t really leave an emotional impact on the viewer.

Rational vs. Emotional Triggers in Marketing

The two commercials appealed to the viewers in different ways. The Red Barn Furniture Outlet commercial used the rational appeal while the Ikea commercial used the emotional appeal.

Rational appeal communicates with the consumer’s rational logic by listing the product benefits or providing proof to convince the consumer of the product’s superiority. On the other hand, the emotional appeal communicates to the consumers’ gut feeling.

Is One More Effective Than The Other?

From our experience at Conversioner, the emotional appeal works much better than the rational, however most of the digital marketers prefer to use the rational approach when promoting their products.

It is said that people buy on emotion then justify their decision with facts, which means that they feel before they think.

Research also claims that rational persuasion requires that the audience make an active effort to receive and evaluate the information. It requires the conscious mind to be engaged and for the audience to be motivated enough to process the information.

In contrast, emotional persuasion relies on the audience’s subconscious mind, which runs on auto-pilot when it comes to the receipt, processing, and evaluation of information.

As such, the decisions that are made at the subconscious level are based on the person’s gut feeling, instincts, or emotions.

Research further shows that people are exposed to over 3,000 ads per day on average, so that it would be impossible for the conscious mind to rationally process the information in these ads even if the brain were actively engaged 24/7.

Neuroscientists say that the act of thinking uses up three times more energy than less challenging tasks, and that the brain is on idle mode when in the non-thinking state 95% of the time.

As such, people are more susceptible to emotional appeals since their brains are mostly in an idle, subliminal state.

In this regard, the Advertising Education Foundation recommends that for emotional appeals to be effective, they should subliminally excite the singular expectation, dream, hope, belief, or thought that gets the target audience’s attention.

What are the effects of emotional triggers on sales?

There are various factors to consider in ensuring the effectiveness of emotional triggers on your sales.

Some of these include the target market’s value systems and age. As such, it is important to gain a good understanding of the emotions and needs of the consumer groups that you want to target.

Using the right emotional appeal touches the people’s cores, making it easier for them to later recall your sales message.

As an example, an automobile company can appeal to parents by having an ad where parents discuss how car features can keep their children safe.

An example is Mazda’s commercial, which shows a young couple taking their newborn baby home in their Mazda car:

Emotional appeal also makes the audience associate the product to positive emotions.

As an example, consistently including photos of happy families in your ads will make people perceive your brand as family-friendly. In this regard, you can use ads to shape your target market’s perception of your brand.

A good example of this is the ad “Android: Furever”, which went viral upon its release. Although it does not show any textual content, it powerfully delivers the message of diversity, which the company espouses:

Research shows that advertisement can significantly influence consumer behavior.

The more frequently your products are associated to positive emotions, the more likely that your target market favors your products over less known competitors.

So How can you use emotional appeal in internet marketing?

Having established the importance and effectiveness of using emotional appeal in traditional marketing, there’s no reason that it can’t be used effectively in internet marketing as well.

There are ways to tap into your target market’s emotions and these should be integrated into your internet marketing strategy, particularly in content marketing.

Note that you have around two seconds to get your audience’s attention, which means the first 2 sentences of your content.

Your goal is to draw in the audience with the first sentence and to lure them down the page. You should then engage them and continue to feed their emotions throughout the remainder of your content.

In this regard, if your aim is to increase brand awareness, build relationships, and share practical and valuable information, then you should compel and engage your audience’s emotions to the point that they will want to share it.

However, if your aim is to move the audience to the next step towards purchase, then you can use sales psychology and neuroscience to stimulate the emotional response needed to achieve specific actions.

For example, a consumer may be moved to purchase a product in order to relieve a pain they’re feeling.

After getting the audience’s attention, the next step is to engage them with your content. You can do this by continuously appealing to their emotions.

Experts indicate that some commonalities among viral content include the presence of the following emotions very early on in the content: positivity; shock and awe; and anger, fear, and anxiety.

In particular, when people feel entertained or when they feel good by what they read, then they are more likely to share what they have viewed or read.

Similarly, data or facts that shock people have more chances of being shared. As well, people tend to want to share the things they’re angry about or fearful of and to even comment on it when they share it. In turn, this leads to more sharing and commenting.

After the audience experiences the initial emotional attraction, logic kicks in a bit, and by this time, you should be presenting the practical and useful aspects of your content.

For example, you can address the problem that your audience has and show how you, as an authority, can resolve that problem.

If you use simple and clear language, along with engaging media, then your audience will see inherent value in your product and move on to making a purchase. If, however, your goal is to increase brand recognition and brand awareness, then you would want your audience to share the content.

Summary

It is clear that you can effectively promote your products and services online by triggering your target market’s emotions.

Although this is a traditional marketing technique, online marketers should also adapt it to their initiatives because that is how the users decide what ad where to buy.

Have you ever visited a casino that actually had a clock hanging on the wall? Probably not. Have you ever wondered why the essential food in the supermarket is located in the very back, forcing you to walk all the way through the store? These are just two elementary offline tricks used to boost sales. The first one is so you will keep gambling without noticing what time it is, and the second one is meant to have you walk around the supermarket, in the hopes you will fill up your cart along the way, with items not on your shopping list. There are many more tricks that shops and stores use to make you buy more. Many of these tricks are also used in the online world, so it is important to learn about and understand them along with the logic behind them.

 

Wait! Do I really need that?

A well known trick shops and stores use is to use their bestsellers as an up sell to sell other products. The reason why this method is usually so successful is that it takes advantage of the fact that purchasing one item significantly increases the chance of purchasing another item. Offline stores might try to convince you to buy a beautiful case if you are already buying flowers. Your local car washer will offer to wax your car in addition to the regular wash. The brilliant way Amazon does this, is by using phrases such as” recommended accessories”, and “frequently bought together”, as well as “customers who bought this item also bought”.

Control your impulse!

A similar upsell trick supermarkets use is to place impulse products in the checkout area. These are usually chocolate bars and sweets, and they can be very tempting, especially when there is a long line at the checkout. Ecommerce sites do this by offering you products when you are already on the checkout page. They use phrases such as, “You may also like…”, or, “Suggested Products”. In the following example from IKEA, I am already at the checkout, in the process of buying a bed, when I am offered to buy bed slats.

Are we mice in a maze?

It has been shown in previous research, that when people walk into the mall, they will usually enter from the right side. Therefore, the most successful stores at the mall will often be on the right side of the main entrance. Similarly, stores will place their best looking and best smelling products on the right shelves. Supermarkets will place fruits and vegetables on the right, because they are colorful and fresh. Also, toiletry stores will place their best perfumes on the right. Off-line marketers know where people go, so they build their storage structure and selling tactics around this. In websites, there is no “right” to turn to, so you have the power to direct your users to the “right” place. Presenting your users with big bright call-to-action buttons helps direct them where you want them to go. Drawing attention to the buttons with arrows or other pointing visuals, will serve you even more, because the more attention you draw to your call-to-action, the more people will follow them. For example, this is a landing page we created, with all the visuals in the page pointing at the button.

Okay, but that’s my final offer!

If you start to walk away during a negotiation, the salesman you’re negotiating with, might be convinced he is about to lose you as a client. This may result in him pulling out an improved offer in order to close the sale. (Note – I’m not recommending that you walk away to get great offers, because it doesn’t always work.)

The same happens online, with the wonderful solution of exit intent pop-ups. These are offers you present to users who are about to leave your website. These offers may vary, depending on what you want to offer. E-commerce sites can offer discounts, while b2b can offer more information in the form of downloading data sheets. And bloggers can offer for visitors to sign up for a newsletter. The logic is to understand that you user is about to leave, and then to decide what the best offer is in order to keep him.

The following example is from Kissmetrics.

Mmm..shiny!

There are tons of other tricks you can take from the offline world and use them online. For example, wrapped items tend to look more prestige. So, in the online world, if you want to make your product look more prestige, you can place a virtual ribbon around it. You will see the use of words like pro, platinum or premium in the following example from Godaddy.

Another example is when stores give you samples in the hopes that you will like what you use. In your website, you can give free trials and hope people will like your product and will agree to pay for it next time. Supermarkets will sometimes give you time-limited coupons. Similarly  online sales are sometimes time-limited as well, such as in the following example from eBay.

 

 Next time you go shopping, look out for the tricks and manipulations the store is pulling to make you buy more. For example consider which products are at eye level and which products are more hidden? What music is the store playing in the background and how does it make you feel? Do you have anything in your shopping cart which you didn’t plan to buy before entering the store?

Did you notice anything unusual about the title of this post? Did you notice the word “THAN” repeats itself? If you didn’t, you’re not alone. Many people miss this repetition thanks to the law of experience – a principle in gestalt psychology that suggests that people use prior knowledge in order to understand certain elements, and look at sentences as a whole and not at each individual word.

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism aims to understand how people perceive and make sense of visual information. According to gestaltism, perceptions are merely the products of complex interactions among various external stimuli. Gestaltism states that objects are considered globally, as a whole before, or in parallel with, perception of their individual elements.

Gestalt psychology claims that wholes are structured and organized using grouping laws. If you learn the grouping laws well enough you will see great change in your conversion metrics and be able to help users complete your funnels quicker and simpler. These laws help design better user interfaces for your site.
Below I have listed the important laws of  gestalt:

 

Law of similarity

This law is often applied in form building.

What do you think, which of the following forms is better?

A:

B:

 

Because of the distance between the labels and the fields in example A, we perceive them as two different columns, making them seem like two different and unrelated groups. By placing them closer together, like in form B, they are emphasized as horizontal pairs. Make it easier for your users to fill in forms in your website by placing labels and fields closer together, and separating each field with a different background color.

 

The law of proximity

This law can, for example, be used when placing radio buttons. Radio buttons are used when the user must select only one choice out of several options. To signal this association to the user, simply place your radio buttons as a horizontal row so that they are closer to each other.

The same principle of proximity is what makes navbars, and related items in checkouts so useful, it is the idea of placing related objects close together. This is applied in the following example from ebay.com, where they offer other items you may also like, and they place them close together in the same area of the page.

 

 

The Law of closure

Think of the Apple logo. Our minds fill in the missing gap and therefore understand this shape as an eaten apple. If our minds didn’t make this completion, we would not understand what it is.

There are plenty of other logos that use the law of closure, here are some examples.

The fact we are able to make these completions and understand  simple shapes as a concept is very useful when coming up with ideas for logos. The advantage of designing your logo with the help of gestalt principles, is that you can create a very simple logo but convey a complex idea. Try to think of some other logos you know. You will find that usually, memorable logos are the most simple logos.

 

The Law of continuity

Here , the principle is that lines that are continuations of each other are perceived as the same line, even in the case of multiple line segments.

For example, when you see the Chanel logo

 

you see it as a regular C and a mirrored C joined together.

 

you don’t see it like this

 

This is another great principle to follow when designing a logo. Very similar to the previous law, this also gives you the option to create a very simple yet unique logo, which will be memorable not despite, but because of its simplicity.

 

The Law of ”Figure-Ground”

This principle describes our ability to identify a figure from the background. This law applies for example in Disqus, notice how there are many things happening on the page, like different colors, shapes, images and texts. However it is still easy for you to tell the figures from the background.

 

Figure-ground lets us know what we should be focusing on the page. This law can also be applied in call to action buttons. For example take a look at this button.

Its got rounded corners, well defined borders, gradient color and resulting illusion of 3D depth.  All of these elements combined differentiate the button from its surroundings. Since your call to action button is the most important element in your page, you want it to be pronounce. Use the above elements to make it easier for the user to notice and identify the button as something that can be activated.

 

Conclusions

Using gestalt principles in user interface design helps us gain functionality and aesthetic appeal and increase the likelihood that your message is communicated to your audience. Perceiving objects as a whole is what makes us recognize objects even if they don’t appear as we are used to seeing them, for example when they are animated.

If we didn’t have this ability, we would not be able to recognize any of the objects you see in this landing page from giftrocket for example.

 Gestalt laws have proven to be very useful in conversion optimization. Do you use any gestalt psychology tricks on your site? Tell us how.

About a month ago I gave a speech about emotional conversion optimization at the Nextcase convention. The purpose of the talk was to introduce marketers to the  term of emotional targeting and get them considering their users feelings and triggers. I then received many questions and requests for additional user cases and explanation on emotional targeting. So below is a summary of the talk about the world of emotional conversion optimization and how to use it for your conversion efforts:

 

 

Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting in a nutshell refers to using data about users to increase conversion. When a user visits a web site, the pages they visit, the amount of time they view each page, the links they click on, the searches they make and the things that they interact with, allow sites to collect that data, and other factors,and create a technical profile of the user and then use it to segment their users. So in fact, when a user searches for Shoes on sale they’ll arrive on a page with shoes for sale for example.

Take a look at this Coca Cola ad for example from the 1940’s: Coca cola selling a drink = Coca cola showing the drink

The world of behavioral targeting is what everyone’s talking about these days; some marketers refer to it as “personalization on the web”. Behavioral targeting is important, but it’s not close to being enough.

 

Emotional Targeting

Emotional conversion optimization (Or Neuroscience) is built on the understanding that 90% of our decisions in life are irrational and that there are many psycho emotional triggers we aren’t aware of that can motivate us into taking action, like ‘loss aversion’ for example or ‘anchoring’. Understanding our users emotional triggers and feelings can help us improve our conversion dramatically.

Consider ads you see on TV for perfume, clothing or even Coca Cola- all driven by emotion. Mostly you won’t even see the product and it’s all about what it makes you feel not the product itself.

Below is an offline ad of Coca Cola from 2013: Other than the logo that we added to this ad, there is no reference to the drink.

 

Sadly it’s 2014 and the world of online marketing is way behind and acts like the world of offline marketing in the 1940’s.

One of the most crucial statistics of 2013 was that the average “click to back” had decreased to 2.4 seconds. Meaning you have less than 3 seconds to convince users to stay on your site / buy your product.

And so, most online ads choose to show their product, talk about its features, why it’s better than their competitors and drop the emotional aspect.

 

Moving Offline to Online

When conversioner started out 5 years ago our mission was to bring the offline emotional world to the online world. By running an in-depth emotional research we are able to profile users according to their psycho emotional triggers and use different messaging and design to triggers these emotions and create action.

An action can be anything from a signup, higher open rate of an email, buying a product or sharing it.

 

Case Study

The world of Binary Options is an extremely competitive one, there are hundreds companies in the industry and they’re ALL copying their competitors (here’s why they should stop that by the way). They all talk about the bonus you receive and the amount of money you will make by trading binary options.

 

Our goal: Increase deposits

The client’s original page contained functional texts and visuals:

• Title: Open an account today and profit up to 78%
• Call to action: Why not click and deposit?
• The testimonials: “I won x amount of money”

All very mechanical, technical and to the point.

The Test

Following our psycho emotional triggers research we started designing new landing pages for testing. I will elaborate on all the test plan step by step in the next post but for now, I can tell you that first round of tests increased revenue by 37% and the entire test increased revenue by 300%.

We created 2 landing pages with the same title: Your Golden Opportunity Has Arrived. And changed only one thing, one page had a women in it and the other a man.

Which one do you think won?

 

 

Part 2 is out, check it out here.