How Can You Enhance Customer Experiences with Empathy Marketing
by Josh Biggs in Marketing on 6th February 2021Customer experience is vital in every business activity. Repeat customers and loyalty can bring in business without increasing customer acquisition costs. Most marketing programs are designed to create long-term relations with the customer. Here we take a look at empathy marketing in detail.
What Is Empathy-based Marketing?
It is a new approach where you put yourself into a customer position to learn about their feelings and their experience. The whole exercise is intended to give them a better customer experience. In this model, you don’t think like a customer, but you are the customer to gain the knowledge that motivates them.
How to Treat Customers With Empathy?
Every day customers are bombarded with advertisements from different digital channels. They are fed up with self-serving ad campaigns run by corporates. They need brands who consider more than a customer. Today’s customer is attracted towards brands which have their best interests at their heart.
You need to ensure the customer understands you are not connecting them only to sell your products and services. You intend to solve the problems they are facing. Even if you are not able to solve all their problems, you genuinely care for them.
Now that you know what empathy marketing is all about, let’s understand how it can enhance customer experiences.
Understand Their Current Needs
In empathetic marketing, you need to think about the present. The fact is you cannot provide the right solution until you understand what your customers are going through right now. These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself during customer research.
- Where are they facing difficulties?
- What are their pain points?
- What are their most urgent needs?
Remember, customers will have different problems. Hence, it would help if you considered providing tailored experiences to customers.
Personalize Messaging
Email is the easiest and popular method to reach customers. According to the latest report, an average person receives 121 marketing emails every day; that is too much noise. Your email will be lost in the inbox and get deleted if it does not stand out.
A leading report states that people are tired of impersonal messages and don’t even bother to read them thoroughly. Hence, it would help if your personalized messages connect with your customer.
You can use big data and analytics to understand a few things like what a customer thinks about your brand. What are his/her likes, dislikes, and tendencies? You need to utilize this information to your advantage to personalize your communication so that the customer feels you are talking directly to him.
Build Connections
In the digital age, connections are created and broken within the spur of the moment. Hence, you need to create experiences that will build connections with your customers. The better the customer experience you provide, the longer the customer will remember you and stay connected.
It would help if you thought about different ways to stay connected online. Think about services and products that will make their life less stressful. It would help if you aimed to create a connection that transcends digital space and creates a sense of belonging.
Establish a Feedback Loop
Feedback loops play an important role in customer retention and building brand loyalty. The connection with the customer does not end with a successful sale. It is the start of a new journey. Your marketing and sales professional should stay connected with the customer after the sale. You can ask the customer about his/her experience with the brand. Ask the customer to leave feedback to help them serve better in the future.
To sum up, empathy-based marketing is the need of the hour as the customer has more choices and can make an informed decision. Empathy can help you cut through the crowd and help the customer see that your company stands for, offering the best value to the customer.