When I began my journey as a conversion rate optimization specialist years ago, I made the same mistakes as other optimizers.

I’d find a leak in Google Analytics and test random stuff based on:

1. ‘Best practices’ I read on different blog posts
2. Hunches and gut feelings
3. Team suggestions 
4. Things we’ve tried before that seemed to work but didn’t last

Then, I’d see the results (or lack of) and end up with no insights and almost nothing I could use to grow their business, inform my next experiments or increase conversions for my clients.

To say I was frustrated would be an understatement. 

I spent hours staring at the computer screen trying to piece together data from different tools and systems to build a strategy that would actually help my clients improve their conversion rates.

But, something was still missing. 

So, I started researching about what really influences buying decisions. 

I dove into dozens of studies conducted by psychologists, neuroscientists and behavioral economists to understand what makes people take action.

These studies also helped me understand the power of emotion and its huge impact on decision-making.

My perspective completely shifted and I changed my conversion rate optimization strategy.

I developed a conversion rate optimization framework that my team and I have successfully implemented for almost a decade.

It’s a strategy that has improved conversions for every client we’ve worked with since then, some by almost 10X.

This strategy serves as a guide for conducting meaningful conversion rate optimization for websites, funnels, ad creatives, and email marketing campaigns. 

It’s a strategy that’s deeply rooted in emotional marketing and consists of four steps.

What Is Emotional Marketing?

To understand what emotional marketing is, we first need to understand one critical scientific fact:

Every decision we (humans) make is rooted in emotion. These emotions influence our customers’ purchasing decisions and the actions they take on our site, funnel, ads and emails.

Emotions are what ultimately determine if your prospects believe you can solve their problem, or if your competitor can. 

Emotional marketing is the process of uncovering the emotions that influence your customers to buy and providing your prospects with the information, messaging and user experience they need to see to convert. 

That’s why my team and I have developed an emotional marketing (also known as the emotional targeting methodology) methodology that helps us use the power of emotions to improve conversion rates. 

Through our work we uncovered that there are 223 emotional triggers that affect how customers make decisions. You won’t target all of these emotions at once on your website or in your ad creatives and email marketing campaigns. 

However, there’s always a mix (side note: there are a few emotional triggers that are more common than others like these two emotional triggers: self-image and social image).

Emotional marketing success depends heavily on how well you target those two emotional triggers. It involves using the right:

• Messaging and copy
• Colors to evoke the target emotions
• Design 
• Headlines
• Bullet points
• Call to action

Before we dive into how to uncover these emotional triggers, let’s take a look at where emotional marketing fits in within a conversion rate optimization process.

Emotional Marketing And Our Conversion Rate Optimization Process

#1 The Research Phase

We start by identifying the leak in the conversion funnel using Google Analytics, heatmaps, and other tools or platforms that allow behavioral analysis. 

This is also the first gateway into the customer’s behavior. It helps us understand:

• What they do on the site
• The browsers and devices they are using
• Pages they visit
• Their geographical location
• Other behavioral elements that help assess where the problem lies

Finding a leak in the funnel though doesn’t necessarily mean fixing it will actually make a difference to our clients’ bottom line. We don’t want to waste time, money or energy on A/B tests that yield no results. 

We use a scoring system I picked up from Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg that requires us to determine:

• Impact – how much of an impact would optimizing this part of the funnel have on the bottom line
• Time – how long it would take to execute the project
• And resources – the associated costs (people, tools, space, etc.) needed to execute a project.

Since starting to use it, we’ve optimized our scoring method and have added many different elements to it.

Many experts have created their own prioritization system. Here’s a prioritization system by ConversionXL that can get you started.

#2 Emotional Targeting Research That Makes Emotional Marketing Effective

This is where my conversion rate optimization process became the process I envisioned it could be. Thanks to this part of our conversion rate optimization process, I’ve been able to increase my clients’ conversion rates by 10X or even 20X over and over again.

We’re focusing on this part of the process in this article so you can deliver these types of results too. This step includes an in-depth analysis of the customer’s emotional triggers, their buying decision process and psychological profile. It’s the step that helps you understand how to use emotions in marketing. 

This emotional targeting methodology helps you approach emotional marketing the right way. 

Once we find the leak in the funnel that’s worth optimizing, we establish a hypothesis of what could fix this leak and come up with a way to do so. This is where we combine all our research, insights and observations in order to come up with ideas on how to fix that leak. 

Craig Sullivan wrote a great piece on establishing a hypothesis, it all comes down to being able to answer the following about your hypothesis:

• We saw {data/feedback}
• We expect that {change} will cause {impact}
• We’ll measure this using {data metric}

#3 Building The Experiment

Thanks to the emotional targeting methodology that’s filled in the gaps, we know what emotions we’re trying to trigger. Now, it’s just a matter of using the right elements to highlight those emotions and values.

We build the test in this step according to our hypothesis and what we believe can drive more conversions. This test includes four steps: 

1. Write conversion copy. 
2. Wireframe and design the landing page (or web page for example)
3. Create an email sequence.
4. Send the relevant components to the development team. 

We brief the developer, set the test up in our testing tool (e.g Google Optimize),  ensure the test meets our quality assurance (QA) standards QA, and launch the test. 

#4 Testing, Analysis And Further Optimization

The testing phase involves:

• Monitoring the test
• Quality assurance mid-way to make sure everything is working ok 
• Analyzing the test
• Creating a report
• Launching a new test based on what we learned 
• Continuous optimizing

The conversion rate optimization process includes a profound report that:

• Provides a strategic analysis to clients and/or colleagues on the impact of the test
• Provides clarity and significant insights people can use for their marketing endeavors 
• Includes records of everything we’ve tested for future reference
• And, most importantly, informs us what our next steps should be to further optimize the asset we’re optimizing

This process is what ensures that every experiment we run is documented AND has a material impact on conversions (whether the new variation wins or loses the test). 

The most meaningful and unique part of the entire process is the emotional targeting methodology I created because it does the one thing most people trying to optimize a funnel, landing page or campaign struggle with most, determine what changes to make to actually have an impact on conversions.

This framework is what has made me a better optimizer and helps me not only increase sales, purchases, downloads or subscriptions for clients, but also deliver incredible insights that manage to positively transform entire businesses based on the knowledge they provide. 

So, let’s dive into it and get you using it too.

Getting Started with Emotional Marketing

Every time I speak at conferences, do workshops or present at various webinars or online events, I get the same question and hear the same frustrated complaint over and over again…

“I spend a lot of time, resources and money on optimizing my website, landing page or customer journey yet the results almost never yield those amazing results I read about and, if they do, they never hold for long.”

Turns out, conversion rate optimization (or CRO) is hard. It’s not like any other discipline in which you learn one skill (for example, becoming a PPC manager) and focus on getting better at it. 

Conversion rate optimization requires many skills and disciplines such as web analysis, copywriting, design, UX, psychology and much more. In order to be a good optimizer (or hire one), you must focus on constantly improving all skills.

If that isn’t enough, another huge reason this complaint keeps recurring is that most businesses treat CRO as a bunch of tactics or tasks. They dedicate all their time to analyzing the data and behavior, but not enough time on getting to know their customers and what they actually need. 

And I mean truly getting to know their customers.

The first thing you must recognize, in order to optimize your site successfully and grow your business with conversion rate optimization, is that there’s more to customers than just gender, age and type of browser they use. People sit behind those screens, not numbers.

In fact, every visitor who comes to your site faces some sort of challenge, whether it’s finding something to wear, getting past communication barriers with their remote team, finding a solution for their child’s anxiety or perhaps just entertain themselves while bored – every visitor on our site has a goal and as Bryan Eisenberg once said:

“For us to achieve our goals, we must first help our customers achieve theirs”.

Bryan Eisenberg

Bottom line: If you understand your customer’s challenges and needs, you can optimize the site for them and, as a result, increase your conversions.

To do that, you need to get to know your customers on an emotional level. Understand what makes them tick and learn how to address them on an emotional level. 

Why emotional? Because every single decision we make in life has an emotional component to it and though many of us think we’re rational people who make rational decisions, that is very far from the truth.

At this point you may be saying to yourself, “Well, that’s nice Talia. However, my product/service isn’t emotional at all״. Well, let me assure you, whatever you’re selling is bought based on the buyer’s emotion. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a cardboard box, heavy accounting software or toilet paper, you have the ability and need to connect your product, service, or experience to an emotion your customers crave more than anything.

Let’s look at how the brain works so that we can better understand how emotional marketing can be used to influence your customer’s decisions. 

Understanding How Our Brains Make Decisions Helps Increase Conversion Rates

Our brains have two main thinking paths. The first is the deliberate, logical part of our mind that’s capable of analyzing a problem and coming up with a rational answer. 

This is the part of our mind that we’re aware of. It’s an expert at solving problems, but it is slow, requires a great deal of energy and is extremely lazy.

The second part of our brain is intuitive, fast and automatic. This part of the brain is actually responsible for most of the things that we say, do, think or believe. 

It’s the part that’s in charge of helping us buy stuff irrationally (and then let’s our logical mind come up with a rational reason for buying it or thinking in a certain way). 

We’ve all done it before, right? Buy an expensive shirt we didn’t need or jump out of a plane (that might just be me). 

As Dan Ariely explains, this part of our brain is the system that causes things like overeating, smoking and texting and driving.

Back in the early 1990’s, a famous study conducted by neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, presented scientific proof that emotions impact our brain and directly influence our decision making process.

Damasio studied people who were suffering from brain damage that prevented them from experiencing any emotions. While most of their behavior was completely normal, they all had one big issue; they were unable to make decisions. 

The fact that they experienced no emotions at all made it hard for them to make decisions on even the most trivial things like, what to have for lunch – chicken or turkey. The participants knew what they had to do but just couldn’t make up their mind.

Even if our customers or clients don’t realize it, we all invest our money in products, experiences, and services that make us feel a certain way – loved, safe, appreciated, part of a community, strong or perhaps just better than others.  

Emotions play a key role in our decision making process both online and offline and, in order to truly grow your business, you have to start understanding your customers and their decision making process better.

You’re probably thinking, “Ok Talia, I get it; emotions matter. Now what?”

Well, it’s time to get acquainted with the emotional targeting methodology that will help you connect to your customers on an emotional level.  It’s time to understand how to use the power of emotions in marketing.

How the Emotional Targeting Methodology Helps You Do Emotional Marketing The Right Way

Most conversion rate optimization processes consist of 3 main steps:

1. Finding the leak in the funnel
2. Create new variation
3. Launch A/B test

The first step is simple to do using Google Analytics, heatmaps and other elements I mentioned before. But what about the second step? How do you know what to change? 

Most marketers rely on blog posts, random guesses, staff recommendations and personal feelings. This is extremely problematic and in NO way effective. You need a system, and that’s where emotional targeting comes in.  

Emotional targeting helps you identify what changes to make for a better experience and higher revenues. The emotional targeting methodology I’ve created is all about understanding our customers better so that you can use emotional marketing effectively. 

It’s a methodology that helps us tap into our customer’s most inner emotional needs and cater to them in our design.  Simply put, the root of every conversion is our decision making process. 

We can provide our customers with better experiences when we better understand how they make purchasing decisions. This then leads to more sales and higher conversions.

It’s a logical flow that goes like this…

Emotions affect decisions

Decisions affect conversions

Conversions affect revenues.  

So, let’s take a look at how we can tap into our customer’s emotions and affect their decision making process.

The 3 Pillars of the Emotional Targeting Methodology for Emotional Marketing

The emotional targeting methodology will help you understand what drives your customers’ decisions to buy your product or service and how to improve your website. 

There are three main pillars that guide us in this methodology.

#1 Make it about the customer.

This is the first and most important step of the emotional targeting methodology. It focuses on becoming customer-driven rather than having your product, features and pricing front and center. 

Your goal now becomes highlighting your customer’s value and making it about them.

It’s simple really. No matter what you’re selling, what people really care about isn’t the what, it’s the why. Our customers want to know what’s in it for them and what their outcome is going to be.  

Since the average person sees approximately 6,000 to 10,000 ads daily, we tend to skip and skim most of what we see. 

Changing this means first capturing our customer’s attention and giving them a reason to continue reading, investing more time in getting to know us and learning about our solution. We do that by making it about them.

A couple of ways to find your why and make it about the customer are listed below.

Conduct Surveys 

Surveys help you gain valuable insights about what your customers and prospects are looking for by asking them specific questions. 

The key to running a successful survey is asking meaningful questions. This means asking less questions about you, and more about them –  their experiences, their goals and needs. 

Make sure your survey has just one goal and is designed to answer one main issue you want to address.

For example, “I want to know which features to kill in my product” or “I want to know who my exact target audience is”. By setting a goal before getting started, you ensure the questions being written support that goal. This keeps you on track and prevents you from writing many different questions that may confuse you later.

 Get a full tutorial on how to conduct meaningful surveys here.

Interview Clients and Team Members 

There’s no replacement for actually having a conversation with your customers/clients and getting to know them better. Your role here is to listen, absorb their comments, words and message and then later use their insights to optimize your copy and user experience. 

Also, interview your teammates who have a daily or weekly touchpoint with customers (e.g customer success, sales). These types of interviews offer two great takeaways: 

1. Understanding how your team sees the customer and how they address them
2. Understanding how far your staff’s opinions and thoughts are different from the clients

Get the full workshop on how to run interviews (and leverage the insights to increase conversions) here.

Do Competitor Research 

No, this isn’t a tip to copy from your competitors. Most of the time, your competitors are copying from theirs and have no idea what they’re doing either.

So, what should you do? Look at the reviews and testimonials on their site to discover what your potential customers (who are currently buying from the competitor) are concerned about, excited about and more. You can later use these insights to define the type of content you want on your site.

Watch this free workshop to learn how to conduct meaningful competitor research.

Segment Customers 

While most customers fit into several categories of personas and profiles, profiling certain types of customers can help with aligning the team, understanding your customer’s intent better and creating certain content for your different persona types (check out this buyer personas article to get started).

These steps and others will provide you with meaningful insights about your customer’s emotional needs. They will also help you determine the kind of content to highlight, concerns to address, testimonials to get and essentially help you plan every single part of your customer journey.

#2 Don’t just show it, make ‘em feel it.

It’s not enough to just make it about the customer by using plain words. You must also use visual elements that enhance emotional triggers. 

No element on a page works alone. Copy, design and all other elements must work together to influence your customer’s decision making process. 

This pillar is based on using different elements in your design according to the way our brain processes information. Our brain processes images and color much faster than text which means that the first thing people see on any landing page, banner, pricing page or email marketing campaign is the images and colors you use. 

It’s not enough to just say it in words. You have to make them feel and see it within the first few seconds they set their eyes on your landing page (or any other creative).

Our brain simply cannot take in every little bullet and sentence we see on a page which means we need to use the power of colors, images and even fonts to get our message through.

In one of our recent monthly webinars, I presented a case study we did for a client while I ran Conversioner. This website’s entire strategy focuses on the product. The headline, “Easy to Use Infographic Creator” highlights the product’s usability, the bullet points refer to all the features they have and their main visual is a video explaining how to use the product.

However, once we conducted our emotional targeting research, we established their customer’s emotional triggers and understood that the main concerns of their customers were to be able to:

1. Stand out in a sea of marketers
2. Create memorable presentations for their team 
3. Make a good impression on their colleagues and manager. 

This understanding of their emotional drivers (and why they would buy this particular product) helped us create a hypothesis and design a new variation that enhanced all of these triggers.

Rather than stating what the platform does (“Easy to Use Infographic Creator”) we highlighted the “why” and their personal interest → “Make Impressive Infographics”. The subtitle was used to empower customers and help them feel confident in creating these infographics within minutes. 

This was highlighted since most marketers feel insecure about their design skills and that presented itself as a major concern in our research. The main visual was used to “show it and not just say it” was a visual of the outcome, what the infographic can look like. This variation outperformed the original one by 24%.

 So, we start by identifying the emotional triggers we want to test and then we establish the images, persuasive colors, fonts and the entire design strategy we want to test that supports these emotional triggers.

Get your FREE cheat sheet on the right way to use the emotional affect of colors here.

#3 Test strategies, not elements

While the first two pillars focus on our research, messaging and design, the third pillar focuses on driving meaningful outcomes from this process and validating our research (and, in fact, our entire conversion rate optimization process). 

 Our goal with this pillar is to ensure we’re making meaningful changes to the customer journey that meaningfully impact on our results. Rather than running A/B tests on individual call to action buttons, headlines or single elements on the page, the emotional targeting methodology encourages us to use the insights we’ve acquired, to run meaningful A/B tests. 

Testing strategies and hypotheses based on our research will ensure our A/B test results are understood and that they spread the knowledge within the organization.  This is a stark contrast to using the results of testing individual elements on a page which can be hard to analyze, understand and scale. 

The beauty of this stage? We’ve already defined the emotional triggers we want to test and the colors, fonts, visuals and content to go with them. All that’s left to do is test them.

Rather than focusing on improving single KPI’s, the results of these types of tests allow us to optimize other parts of our funnels such as our retention efforts, email marketing, ads and much more. The insights and knowledge driven from these types of A/B tests can completely transform your business and help all teams optimize their process according to the customer’s needs.

Next Steps: Use the Emotional Targeting Methodology As A Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy

The true value of the emotional targeting methodology is that it does more than just turn more visitors into customers. It also delivers powerful insights to the entire company, from your marketing teams to sales, retention and even your shipping. 

As a result, customer retention rates increase since your entire team knows how to communicate with your target audience and deliver the best kind of product. Remember that our biggest challenge in conversion rate optimization isn’t the tools we use, the lack of resources or having low budgets, the biggest challenge is us. We’re the problem! 

If we keep treating our customers as if they’re just devices, browsers or geographical locations we’ll keep striking out, missing out on the real potential of conversion rate optimization and getting frustrated with our results.