This One Simple Question Will Make Your Customers Fall In Love With You.

What earns brand “love” is the connection brought to life through tangible emotional experience that makes a customer feel unique. This level of engagement goes beyond the traditional markers of personalization to speak to the customer on their personal level. Cold analysis of past purchase behaviour, sniffing a customer’s digital exhaust of cookies and social media postings, and stalking them around the Internet with re-targeting is hardly going to convey a sense of inclusion, specialness and emotional well being that customers crave. This unique treatment requires a brand to know what makes their customer tick; knowing the parameters of emotional intelligence about individual consumers.

To gain emotional intelligence from a customer requires a basis of reciprocal communication. We can already see the successful results of reciprocal brand to consumer relationships with Uber, Opentable, and Airbnb to enhance service offerings. However, we are yet to see brands using reciprocal communications with consumers to delve deeper into the psyche of the customer to achieve brand “love”.

So, how do you begin to find out more about your customer without being intrusive? How about through transparency, honesty and trust – just ask customers what they are interested in. If engaged do so in a fun way, your customers will actually enjoy telling you about themselves and will be more likely to give you permission to use their profile in marketing communications.

We’ve found this to be true through our collaboration with brands to build a reciprocal relationship with their customers. Using autoGraph’s interactive brand scroller, customers swipe up to like and down to dislike to submit their preferences, which compiles psychological data on their attitudes, emotions and aspirations.

We work specifically with brands to navigate this new level of reciprocal customer engagement. For example, a simple campaign of “Tell Us What You Want” immediately positions the brand as transparent, trustworthy and willing to listen to their customer. On average this results in 73% of invited customers going on to submit their preferences to create a profile of attitudes, emotions and aspirations, and 92% giving OPT IN permission to use the profile in marketing communications.

This emotional, aspirational and attitudinal data is then used to inform marketing and loyalty campaigns that speak to the customer. Using this data achieves almost immediate ROI for our clients; existing campaigns have resulted in 7 to 25 X uplift in results when the consumer attitude is taken into account in targeting and messaging.

This new level of engagement practice is supported by the DMA’s “Talking the Consumers Language: Retail 2016” research report which points out a “latent lust for loyalty” and a desire for a “reciprocal relationship”. Download the research here.

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