The growing and increasingly competitive ecommerce market has forced brands to look beyond just optimizing their basic site capabilities, such as payment and checkout functions. To truly stand out and be successful, it’s important to differentiate your brand in more creative ways and focus on building emotional connections with consumers. Enabling shoppers to identify with your brand and story on a more personal level will help you build a loyal customer base, increase long-term sales and revenue, and elevate your brand’s reputation.
The benefits of building deeper relationships with customers
Customers who feel emotionally connected to your brand are highly satisfied with your products and offerings, agree and identify with your overall mission, and feel like their deep desires are fulfilled. Research shows that fully connected customers are 52% more valuable than “baseline” customers, defined as those who are highly satisfied but not connected with nor do they appreciate the brand’s unique identity. Although fully connected customers constitute just 22% of customers for brands, they bring in 37% of the revenue and spend twice as much annually on average compared to highly satisfied but non-connected customers.
Emotionally connected customers not only spend more and use the product more, but also help spread brand awareness through word-of-mouth. Only 3% of consumers would recommend a brand based on their values or principles, whereas 44% would recommend it based on emotional criteria. Feeling happy and satisfied with their purchase, emotionally connected customers bring increased revenue and prestige for brands.
How to create emotional connections with consumers
The evidence makes it clear why creating an emotional connection with consumers is important – now let’s look at how to achieve that. One way to trigger emotions in shoppers is to leverage immersive and interactive designs in your online store. Everything from your advertising and marketing campaigns to your landing pages and website has to actively engage them. Using video and 3D animation is especially effective in increasing engagement and creating a memorable experience. 84% of consumers say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. For example, the hair care brand Wuli Grooming features an engaging video of a customer using their product, allowing the consumer not just to witness the product’s utility, but also experience the “feel” and emotional benefits of it.
With mobile making up 52% of internet traffic and desktop use declining, brands also have to consider that the majority of online shopping happens on mobile and adapt accordingly. Mobile devices carry unique characteristics – you can touch, drag, press, hold, or swipe directly with your fingers – that allow for an even more interactive and deeply connected shopping experience compared to desktops. Brands need to use this to their advantage and ensure their site is mobile-optimized and intuitively reacts to the shopper’s touch, for example by using mobile-friendly designs like 3D cube transitions. The design of your site and how it looks and feels for the shopper on their mobile device plays an integral part in creating an entertaining and immersive experience that helps build that emotional connection.
Brands that want to rise above the competition and bring their reputation to the next level must focus on fostering an emotional connection with consumers. This will lead to a base of loyal customers who will spend more on your products, stay for the long term, and recommend and spread praise about your brand. A great way to start building a unique mobile shopping experience that triggers those deeper connections is to integrate immersive design, such as video and 3D images, and build mobile-friendly pages that are intuitive and react to the users’ touch.
