You Can Use Emotional Intelligence To Drive Customer Acquisition
Organizations are always looking to shore up their customer-base by attracting new demand for their products and services. Using the sales funnel, they deploy numerous strategies to move a prospect from the point of awareness of their product to taking action on the same product.
With rival brands also competing for a larger chunk of the market share, emotional intelligence comes in, as an effective tool in creating a distinct approach for any such organizations that seek to drive customer acquisition.
Experts instructs that emotional intelligence enables businesses to anticipate prospects needs, gauge prospect’s openness and guide prospect with compassion towards making a decision to on board the prospect.
When you cast your net into the sea of customer in a bit to catch their attention, the corresponding processes and systems must be set up to effectively harness the marketing efforts. Whether it comes in form of a lead magnet, advertising or any other promotional activity – the aim should be to get the customer to act upon the information being presented. Since most buying-decisions are made from a place of emotions and justified by logic, the science of customer rationale must be understood and applied by organization seeking to gain the attention of their prospects.
- Find and Focus On Your Niche
It speaks to having a high level of organizational awareness when marketing campaigns and promotional efforts are centred on a defined demography. Except you’re selling air, everybody cannot be your customer. Niche marketing stems from a place of awareness that the product or services offered by an organization isn’t universal and as such there’s no need trying to persuade vultures to have a haircut. Vagueness in marketing is usually a lack of cognitive messaging and smacks of unprofessionalism. The idea of marketing is to convert those who are more likely than others to take action on the offer presented before them.
Nigerian designer, Uche Nnaji, owner of OUCH Stores offers sartorial services to those at the very top of the socio-economic ladder. Hence his stores are located at high-end locations like Muritala Mohammed International Airport, the Lekki Peninsula area of Lagos State, Nigeria etc. For him to acquire new customers, he must tailor his marketing accordingly to attract those who can afford and appreciate the value of his products. What this target market take as necessity is seen as luxury by those that aren’t in the socio-economic class.
- Use The Right Channel
After identifying the who and where you prospective customers are, the next thing is to figure out the best medium to use in engaging them. There are some platforms that are more effective than others when it comes to reaching certain demographics. Based on the target market, you need to adopt a platform that prospects are easily reached. For example, radio and television reach a certain type of audience, same with digital media or newspapers. This is because when people are already emotionally attached to a platform, it’s easier to influence their buying decisions.
Younger people tend to use more of new media platforms and the older population go more with traditional platforms. Tik Tok recently has proved to be the platform where brands get the biggest engagements from prospective and existing customers alike because numerous skits and challenges make it much easier to content to go viral. Legendary music producer, Don Jazzy, uses Tik Tok to promote new projects by the artistes on his record label, Mavin. Using this emotionally intelligent strategy, Blood Samaritan, a song by one of his signees, Ayra Starr has gone viral.
- Use Tasters – A Tip of The Iceberg
There is such a thing as buyer’s remorse; when customer have a nasty feeling in their gut after they purchase a particular good or service. So there is a degree of risk-aversion from prospects and your job is to help them manage such risks. It’s a type of empathy when you acknowledge the valid concerns of those who may seem hesitant to sign up for your products. What you can do is to, as much as is feasible offer trial versions or free samples of the product you’re selling. A trial version of your product is an opportunity for a prospect to ascertain your value proposition at no cost to his or personal account, it also shows how much you rate your prospects and how far you’re willing to go in acquiring their patronage.
When I released my best-selling book, The Magic of Emotional Intelligence, many prospects who hadn’t known me well enough nor the superior value I was offering developed cold feet – they were sure that the book will be worth the hype. What I then did was to make one chapter from the book available for free download. Just like clockwork, the numbers of sales shot up – driven by those whose concerns were addressed by the access to a sneak peak of my book. Prospects have needs competing for their limited resources, offering them a slice of the bread at little or no cost is an emotionally intelligence way of acquiring customers.
- Run A Referral Programme
One of the best ways to acquire new customers is to leverage the social capital that you have with the existing ones. A referral programme is a system where those who have already moved from having the awareness of your offerings to enjoying them are given incentives when they introduced others. This is the use of the element of motivation in emotional intelligence to drive actions that generate desired outcomes. The best form of advertising isn’t necessarily the most expensive one but the one that comes from a satisfied client. By tapping into that pool of goodwill, you can reach out in a better, faster and more cost-effective manner in converting prospects into customers. This word-of-mouth approach can be very useful if deployed strategically.
Digital banks like V Bank and Kuda Bank have a referral bonus for existing customers that introduce prospective customers to the organizations. By using custom-links, their existing customers can earn money simply by getting others to open accounts. This is a win-win for these organizations because not only do they grow their clientele base, the pay-outs for bonuses is only a tiny fraction of their marketing budgets and is definitely much lower than the average cost of acquiring a customer.
- Apply Horizontal Integration Of Your Offerings
Just as businesses leverage the social capital from their pool of existing customers to attract new customers, they can also leverage the goodwill or popularly of their more established products to attract new customers. It is a great multi-product strategy that organizations with great marketing experience use; they introduce or advertise new products alongside those with notoriety. The idea is that the trust and likeness that people have for the older products will be transferred to the newer ones. Through the lens of emotional intelligence, this can be seen as team work especially when subsidiaries of the same parent organization collaborate to boost the sales of one another. Just as this is done on an intra-organizational basis, it can also be done on an inter-organizational basis in a bid to attract new customers.
One popular example of this, is what Facebook has done with Instagram and WhatsApp. After acquiring both companies from their owners, Facebook automatically became their parent company and consequently integrated horizontally. That is why Facebook users can link their accounts to Instagram and WhatsApp respectively. WhatsApp now has an updated version that included the signature, “WhatsApp by Facebook” – a move designed to draw upon the successes of Facebook in driving customer acquisition.
- By Mergers & Acquisitions
Sometimes, organizations can out rightly acquire customers through merging with another brand thereby inheriting their customer base. This may come in form of acquiring a significant stake, sometimes enough to warrant a total change in brand identity. When organization realize that a rival brand has a very vibrant customer base and it cannot necessarily win them over with aggressive marketing, it takes the route of acquisition. Smaller brands usually have challenges with securing huge capital outlay but they don’t lack innovative ideas –which ensures that they can compete favourably with those organization with larger war chests. The social awareness element of emotional intelligence, recognizing the strength of other brands makes organizations take this path to driving customer acquisition.