How to Make an Emotional Connection Through Your Marketing

Today I’m going to dig into the importance of emotional connection all the way through your marketing process.

Why is emotional connection important through your marketing process? And what is emotional connection?

Humans are emotional creatures. We interact with other humans in a community environment and in an emotional fashion. We are most persuaded by elements that have an emotional component to it.

It’s easy to forget that humans are actually people, especially when we study marketing, and when we’re inundated with marketing, and when we’re inundated with these ideas of conversion rate tests and split testing and persuading individuals. Then we read these books about how one word can double conversion rate over another word… It is easy for us to begin to think that when human beings are buying, they are actually machines that respond differently to different words.

So if we have a certain word, you’ll respond better. If we use a red headline vs. a yellow headline, you’ll respond better. If we use scarcity and we tell you that you can only get this for 3 more days and the price goes up, then you’ll get more sales.

It’s really easy for us to think of the human as simply a machine that responds in a certain way.

That’s actually not the case.

The reality is that as humans we respond emotionally to all the elements in the offer. But we actually respond deeper than just the offer – we respond at a visceral level. We respond to everything in the campaign. How we respond to a sales letter is predicated by the frame in which we read it – and that frame is created by:

• Every email we’ve read.
• Every time we’ve heard your voice.
• Every time we’ve seen your face.
• Every time we’ve seen a landing page.
• Every time we’ve gone to a search engine and looked for you, and found good or bad comments about you.
• Every time we’ve gone to your social media page.
• Or your video page.
• Or anywhere else.

Because we as humans make these emotional decisions then perhaps the first question would be “Why all the emphasis on headline color and headline size and scarcity issues and pricing and all of that?”

It’s because it’s easy to measure those things. It’s very difficult to measure your emotional connection. It can be measured, but it’s very difficult to measure. And it’s very, very difficult to measure in numbers.

It’s very difficult for us to write two sales letters and then have a jury of people that says that one is more emotionally connecting than the other one. The truth of the matter is, the one that converts better is probably the one that emotionally connects better.

If we use a particular color in that inspires trust in our headline, then we are perhaps changing the environment so that it’s easier for us to break into that emotional place. Some people are able to make that emotional decision.

Think about scarcity: You only have 3 days left to buy. You have 24 hours left to buy. There are only 4 copies left. Is that not an appeal to some level of emotionalism? That is an appeal to something emotional inside of us; from an emotional perspective it’s fear of loss. We take action because we are afraid that someone else will purchase one of those 4 copies and we won’t.

We’re afraid that our competition is going to get a hold of this information and we’re not going to be able to.

All of these things stand in an emotional place.

The easiest way for me to teach you this is by codifying some things, and by showing you how to make some judgement calls.

For example, a particular font may convert better in a particular test. A particular color may convert better in a particular test. A particular set of words converts better in a particular test.

And a particular type of offer, or a particular pricing scheme tends to work better in a particular test.

But the results that you can get from just doing scientific testing pale in comparison to the results you can get if you can genuinely learn how to tap into the emotional needs of your prospects and buyers.

I want to use an example from the fitness world to make this jump off the plate.
In the fitness world, if someone were to say “I want to become more fit. I want to lose some weight. I want to gain some muscle. And I want to get healthier. What do I need to do to do that…” there’s a lot that goes into that answer.

Imagine someone wanted to completely understand that entire rainbow of options, so that they could make the best decisions for themselves for the rest of their life. This is something that may take 10, 20, 50, 100 or more hours of study just to learn all the pieces. And to be able to get the best results for their body for the rest of their life. However, let’s face it, most individuals are not willing to invest 100 hours learning all of these things.

If a fitness instructor were to say “I have a special program: if you’ll spend 100 hours with me, then I’m going to teach you everything you need to know to be able to make your own decisions about these particular things…”

That program wouldn’t sell very well!!!

So what the fitness people do instead is make it appealing to the masses. They give you a 3 step program: You make this adjustment to your diet. You make this adjustment to your exercise. You make this adjustment to your nutrition. And, you’ll get great results.

Now the results won’t be as good as if you hired a personal trainer that spends an hour with every single day for 100 days. But the results might be 70% of the way there. So it’s something that they’ve created – assembly-line created, so that the most people can get the most amount of results across the board on average.

That’s what’s happened in our marketing.

It’s really easy to begin to believe that our marketing is just about the numbers. But the numbers are only where we measure things. Certainly, as we go through the numbers, we may say “Boy, we have evidence that this particular item is effecting our conversions.” But what does this tell us at a deeper level?

It tells us that this particular item is helping people make an emotional “yes” decision to purchase.

The emotional connection that we want to create with that needs to occur all the way through our campaign.

We have to have emotional consistency running through the campaign.