We've witnessed a major shift in power - we're in a place where the customer rules the brand. To get ahead of your competitors you need to figure out a way of offering a distinctly better customer experience.
Your emotional engagement plan will work as a great indicator for the future health of your business, allowing you to anticipate and act before things happen.
But the biggest challenge isn’t in the creation of the strategy, it’s the execution of it that will really set you apart from your competitors. Linking customer engagement to the value of the business by connecting it to ‘real’ business metrics and results will also mean that your campaign will survive the chop if the bottom line isn't being met.
Making sure that your strategy is practical and can achieve real world aims is essential to making it work when it comes to execution.
Align your brand with the emotions that drive your customers
Your strategy should be based on how your customers really feel. Although brands may be liked or trusted, most fail to align themselves with the emotions that drive their customers’ most profitable behaviours. If you don’t understand their emotions, you don’t understand your customers and you won’t see results from your plan when it is implemented in the real world.
Recognise that customer emotions change
To get the best results, companies must align their emotional connection strategies with their specific customer engagement objectives. To do this they need to vary their approach to customers as they move forward through the buyer’s journey and adapt to a customer’s emotional changes throughout.
A recent HBR article noted that in banking, the desire to “feel secure” is a critical motivator when attracting and retaining customers early on. When cross-selling products later, the wish to “succeed in life” becomes more important. By recognising this, a bank could adapt their approach to the customer as they move through their journey.
Involve customers in innovation
Keeping your customers engaged means that they are more likely to give their time and feedback to your brand. By adopting a crowd-sourcing mentality to innovation and using the ideas and involvement of your customers to shape the direction of your brand you will send out a powerful signal of commitment and engagement with customers.
Use personas and segmentation to make your communications more targeted
Delivering your propositions in the same way to everyone won’t help with engagement. By using appropriate segmentation you can shape your messaging and proposition so that it becomes more relevant to the individual. Use the language that they use, images that resonate with them and communicate with them using their preferred channel to ensure that they engage.
Also, try to understand and engage with the emotional drivers and aspirations of your different customers, by doing so you can align your communication strategy to what will resonate with them.
Be bold and be distinct, so you can genuinely compete on experience
How can you create an experience that competes with your competitors if there is no difference between your experience and theirs? Don’t just settle for recycling their ideas, whether it be for an app or a self-service portal. Challenge yourself and ask, what can you do that is genuinely different?
Set practical targets to make sure you hit the mark
By ensuring that your strategy can be implemented practically and setting reasonable targets based on what your customers really feel you can start to execute your strategy well and make a difference to your customers’ experiences. By putting the customer at the heart of your business and focusing on your persona you will soon start to see significant business results.
To explore emotion further check out our most recent eBook 'The Essential Guide to Emotional Engagement: The Secret to Customer Experience Success' which explores the role of emotion in capturing the Voice of the Customer and how to emotionally engage your employees.
