According to research by Capgemini, 70% of emotionally connected customers spend over twice as much with brands they’re loyal to. Personalization is now an expectation, and brands that resonate with their customers’ values form deeper connections and build lasting trust.
Data insights may provide brands with the information they need to successfully connect with customers, drive results, and promote loyalty, but without the right strategy and creative, execution often falls flat.
To get results and deliver personalization at scale, brands should consider the following:
1. Positive Emotion Can Influence Consumers to Make an Unconscious Decision
Keeping customers engaged and happy is at the heart of all successful campaign activity. According to Statista, over 347 billion emails alone will be sent daily in 2023. The key to breaking through the noise is understanding consumer emotions and then tailoring communications to drive positive outcomes.
Once the initial positive connection is formed, maintaining it is just as important. Through personalized touchpoints that align with a customer’s wants and needs, brands can guide their customers to make an informed purchase decision, because an affinity for the brand has already been established.
Wolt knows about an emotionally invested customer. Is there any better feeling than getting sushi delivered to your front door? Because they’re an app-based service, we helped Wolt create customer experiences and connect with their audience through other digital channels like email and push messages. This ensured their customers remain connected, even when they weren’t in-app.
With over 420 emails, push notifications, and in-app messages—in 15 different languages—Wolt created connections with merchants and customers. Personalizing language and content, Wolt was able to show customers they wanted to take time to connect with them on a personal level. This helped build a positive connection with their customers. Once the initial positive connection was formed, Wolt used surprise-and-delight campaigns like “14 days of free delivery,” to solidify them as the first choice when convenience calls.
2. Demonstrate Value to Customers to Form Deeper Connections
Focusing on the emotional benefit of using a product or service demonstrates a higher ROI to the consumer than the initial cost of investing. Furthermore, connecting that value to a relatable, real-life scenario creates a deep connection between brand and consumer. Building audience personas is one strategy brands can use to personalize value-based messaging. For example, a telemedicine brand may target a university student with messaging that shows how a reduction in anxiety could be a huge benefit for their next presentation. A secondary persona for that same brand could be a mother with young children, served with messaging to demonstrate by reducing their anxiety levels, they could increase the amount of quality time spent with their children.
Big Health is familiar with value-based messaging. It seeks to chart the future of digital medicine with digital therapeutics, focused on helping millions with a priceless commodity: mental wellbeing. With the rising popularity of telehealth, Big Health want to demonstrate value in a competitive market, building customer engagement driven by trust.
To begin demonstrating a deeper value, Big Health first needed to determine who their customers are, and the intrinsic motivation to improving their mental health. Primary and secondary audience personas were created with sub-categories including, personal interests, needs, challenges, and life goals. Unique customer journeys were constructed, and each persona has its own sequence, cadence, triggers, and content.
What sets Big Health apart, is the clinically validated, cognitive behavioral therapy, accessible through a phone. Data insights, like the fact their ‘Daylight’ product helps 71% of patients achieve clinical improvement in anxiety are used strategically in the unique customer journeys, giving Big Health the opportunity to build trust and deepen connections with their customers.
When general brand value is focused on how a product will integrate to improve the customers overall quality of life, the commodity almost becomes priceless.
3. Combine Strategy and Creative With Tech and Data to Deliver the Highest ROI
It’s crucial to engage both sides of the brain—the rational left and the emotional right—to create long lasting personalization at scale. Combining powerful tech and data, like Iterable’s AI Suite, to inform personalized messaging, enables a clearer understanding of which messaging will resonate with customers. This includes geolocation, language, and typical orders—for example, takeout on a Tuesday. With Iterable’s Brand AffinityTM, channel optimization, and predictive goals at your fingertips, brands can target each customer at the right time and on the right channel to ensure on-going relevancy.
But, we can’t forget that strategy and creative are important tools to use alongside data and tech. Personalized data can be used by strategy to create brand personas and determine the optimal time and channel to receive the highest clicks and conversions. Creative adds to this customer-centric strategy to pull all campaign pieces together and cut-through to deliver an emotional connection.
The world has changed, and customer retention has never been more important. Acquisition has never been harder for brands. As evidence tells us, customers don’t just buy what you do, they buy why you do it. To get results and deliver personalization at scale you need to execute both sides, left and right, rational and emotional. With strategically led data and tech informing the creative, you can have the winning formula to make that all-important emotional connection and drive ROI.
Want more? Check out our full Activate session, Let’s Get Rational About Emotion.
