Empathy Based Marketing

In the best of times and in the midst of crisis, customer connectivity is core to business success.  That means we need to focus on helping them as real people, not clicks, and dollar signs. 

An Empathy Lesson I Learned Early

I spent over 20 years in the spa industry offering skincare and cosmetic tattooing. They are optional services and high-ticket. 

At first, like any field,  you are trying to get your skillsets perfected. Then you have to learn marketing...it’s not taught in the training programs.  You have to build the client’s trust, help them like you, let them get to know you. 

You are a coach, educator, someone who has had their problem and understands what they are feeling.

I learned that listening with empathy, focusing on the client, learning from them, and engaging with them was key. My total goal was to help them feel better about themselves and make their lives easier.

I developed great friendships with many caring, professional colleagues with successful careers.

I also met some that were of a very different nature...transactional. The client was a job, money. Regardless of what they said, they weren’t really engaging with them. And their careers were short-lived.

I’ve seen the same thing in many alternative health businesses. Supplements, CBD, skincare, and beauty products. Engaging with empathy makes a big difference.

Something to Remember

What most businesses don’t tend to keep in mind in their marketing is customers don’t decide to buy logically. 

We are feeling beings who think, not the other way around. Even the most analytical person you know depends on discipline to control letting their emotional thoughts impact their decision.

A respected neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, discovered that every human decision depends on emotion.  Every single decision. 

We must focus on emotional connections and let them lead naturally to see conversion. That relies on really deeply knowing your customer and their emotional motivators.  

3 Ways to Enhance Your Empathy Marketing

A lot of marketing tends to be random.  A study by the CMO Council reported that 80% of markets don’t know what the next best action for their customers is.  

They need to automate to enhance customer engagement. However, automation is transactional. That makes it harder to employ emotional marketing.

Here are three ways you can apply empathy today.

Start with Your Customer

“Walk a mile in their shoes.”  You need to go into their world, their mindset to really understand them. Look for how you can make their lives better, solve their problems. What do they want?  How is their problem impacting their life? 

Do they want their pain to stop? Do they want to sleep better or perform better? Why? Feel better? Why? To enjoy life more? Enjoy their family more? 

Look for ways you can help them.

Let them know you understand their problem, feel their pain. Show them how to solve their problem. Validate it. Other customer’s success stories can be very effective at doing this. A real person they can identify with. They build trust.

Develop Digital Conversations

Think conversations first, then let them slide into fulfilling the steps of a buying journey.  None of us like to be “sold to.” We like and are quite willing to buy if something will make us happier and solve a problem.  Focus on the conversations. Extend an invitation to talk, to converse. 

Social media can be a great opportunity for this. 

Start with the conversation...invite dialogue. Listen and learn. Converse with them. Finally, recommend something that will help them.

When we focus on helping, the relationship changes. We’re there to help them...not focused on getting a sale.

Bring that attitude and those emotions into your marketing. Treat them like you’d like to be treated in their place.

Provide Empathy Content 

Customers and prospective customers don’t want more content.  They want helpful, empathetic, useful information. It needs to be customer-centric. It needs to show them a solution to their problem. Support them. Sometimes it’s hard to make a change.

Use the terms customers use. Helpful blog posts. Useful case studies. Fantastic articles. Amazing videos. It’s all about feelings, emotions, and the right word choices.

Support this with one of the things that customers want most...quality interactions with your team. Your team needs to feel your empathy, incorporate it into your company culture and share it with customers.

One Last Thought

Emails are a great place to include empathy.  Every business is ramping up an email’s place in marketing. However, I see a lot of emails that are stuck in the old long-form sales letter format.  Or on the other side...purely transactional.  

For an article on using RAS Triggers to activate empathy, you might find this article interesting. Read it Here.

It’s time to update to empathetic emails that follow modern guidelines if you want more opens and conversions.

Need help bringing more empathy into your marketing efforts? Message me: Judith@jcpwellnesscopy.com.