Every decision made by your customers is based on emotion. Whether those are conscious emotions or subconscious, they play a significant role in your customers’ buying decisions. Understanding what triggers the different types of emotions in your customers can greatly impact your ability to develop effective marketing campaigns.
Most human beings have similar basic mental triggers that drive us to take action. By analyzing these triggers and figuring out how to position them, we can get our potential customers to take the desired actions or give the desired response. But there is a trick in using emotional triggers to influence customers. You should not come out as too cheesy or interrupting, or else your efforts would backfire. Effective emotional triggers influence people’s decisions without making your intentions too evident to them.
This article will walk you through 8 popular emotional triggers that affect all aspects of your marketing tactics. By the end of this post, you will know how to use emotional triggers for marketing.
8 Powerful Emotional Triggers to Use in Marketing
Below is a list of eight powerful emotional triggers that you can use to drive more sales to your business.
1. Fear
When fear is used as one of the emotional triggers for marketing, it is usually applied in the form of ‘FOMO’. ‘FOMO’ stands for Fear of Missing Out. Most of you must have heard of this phrase before. It is also used in other aspects, not just in marketing. This is one of those emotional triggers that can produce strong reactions in individuals without conscious thought. This trigger can literally override a person’s entire thought process. This allows marketers to take advantage of the emotions of their target customers. How do they do that? They pull the fear strings of the target customers to influence them to purchase their products.
FOMO is commonly used in the content on sales pages, in limited-time offers, and in other marketing offers that do not give many opportunities to the customers to process their thoughts. For example, a checkout page on an eCommerce website might offer a 50% discount on the purchase, but put a timer next to the discount, claiming that the discount is only valid for the next 10 minutes. This will instill fear in the customer that if they don’t make the transaction within the next 10 minutes, they will have to pay double the amount to buy the selected product.
FOMO should not be used as scam schemes. If you use fear to influence customer decisions ethically, it can drive more sales. But if you use it misleadingly, it will badly and negatively affect your brand image, which will eventually cause a dip in your sales.
2. Time
These first two emotional triggers on our list are quite similar. When you limit the time your customer has to make a favorable purchase, you are again using the concept of FOMO to influence or speed up their decision.
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Everyone is busy in their lives and daily routines. Anyone could use more time. What if you were told that your commute to work would reduce to half if you bought a certain item? That sounds quite appealing, isn’t it? Giving the promise to your customer that they will have more time available within their day if they make a certain product purchase can be one of the most powerful emotional triggers. But remember, once you make such a promise in your inbound marketing, it becomes your responsibility to fulfill it as well. Always make realistic commitments, as that’s the only path to your brand’s prosperity.
3. Trust
The third on our list of emotional triggers is trust. If you want to gain customer loyalty, make sure you earn their trust. If your target customers truly trust your marketing messages, they are more likely to prefer buying from you than from any of your competitors. Trust is an emotion that cannot be faked. To gain the trust of your audience, you need to strategize your marketing activities carefully.
Generally speaking, the more transparency you provide in your sales offers, marketing content, and advertisements, the easier it gets for your customers to trust you. Another way of building trust is to share the testimonials and reviews from your happy customers. People are more likely to trust the reviews and comments written by your existing customers than anything that you claim about your brand in your ads.
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4. Value
The perceived value of your product or service shows how important it is to your targeted customers. Customers make many buying decisions based on their perceived value of brands and products. Everyone wants to get the best price for a product that has the highest value for them. Give your customers good deals by matching your price with their expectations and perceived value. This is among those emotional triggers that can give you exponential sales if you know how to use it properly.
5. Belonging
All human beings need to feel a sense of belonging. A sense of belonging gives us validation. It makes us feel good. We all have a strong desire to belong to someone or something.
How can validation and belonging be used as emotional triggers for marketing? Well, your customers have a greater chance of buying from you if your product makes them feel more accepted in the community. For example, a gym owner can promote his fitness business through adverts that show that when someone loses weight, they feel more comfortable and attractive to move around in society. A brand selling organic food products may show in ads that eating organic food enhances a person’s health, improving their social skills. You can use different emotional triggers to invoke people’s desire to have a sense of belonging.
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6. Guilt
Some emotional triggers can be tricky, and guilt is one. Making someone feel guilty is generally not a good thing. But if used subtly and positively, guilt and regret can become powerful emotional triggers in marketing.
When you use guilt and regret as emotional triggers for marketing, the way you phrase your content is critical. You might face risks of your content being taken the wrong way.
7. Instant Gratification
Instant gratification is one of the most positive and pleasant emotional triggers that you can use to drive more sales to your business. Marketers use the concept of instant gratification in their campaigns so commonly that it has become like a norm in today’s world.
The credit for this goes to the digital world. For instance, if someone wants to watch a movie, they have many options. They don’t need to line up at a store to buy a DVD at a store. They can choose to go to a cinema, search for the movie on Youtube, or simply browse it on Netflix.
As people get more used to getting what they want instantly, marketers are also getting smarter using instant gratification to speed up their sales. Good marketing funnels are built so that the user gets some instant gratification on the way to their purchase. When they reach the end of the funnel, they simply cannot resist purchasing to get the rest of the gratification.
8. Competition
Everyone wants to feel competitive. There is really nothing wrong with a little competition. It can give you the boost that you have been looking for.
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Your customers constantly need to be stronger, better, and faster than others in their social circle. If you offer them something that makes them feel better than their peers, they are likely to buy it. Making your customers feel competitive in their environment can give rise to multiple emotional triggers, influencing them to buy your products and services.
Our list of eight powerful emotional triggers can help you increase your sales if used properly. To make these emotional triggers work, you’ll need a website or landing page where you publish your marketing content. People spend a lot more time browsing through the internet than watching television or reading billboards in this day and age. That’s why marketers are more focused on their digital marketing strategies than the traditional forms of advertising.
If you want to build a website for your brand and want to get it done quickly and for free, check out Strikingly. On Strikingly, you can create a website all by yourself without writing any code or learning any programming language. You don’t have to pay anything either. Our free plan includes many tools that are sufficient for you to get started with a basic web design.
Our editor allows you to edit and update your website content any time you like. This is very helpful if you like changing your marketing frequently offers for using different emotional triggers at different times. Our platform is built with the ease of use of our customers in mind. If others can make their website on Strikingly on their own, you can do it too.
