Why You Should Sell Emotions, Not Products

Are you looking to your service or product for marketing direction? Do you just “wing it” when it comes to A/B testing? You could be one of the many businesses contributing to the billions of dollars a year in lost online retail revenue.

Talia Wolf, founder and CEO of Conversioner, sat down with Unbounce for a podcast interview to discuss the way businesses can improve their marketing strategies. The companies that Wolf works with struggle to increase their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and ROI (Return on Investment) for their online platforms. This marketing expert reveals to her clients not just strategies, but proven formulas for multiplying the number of online visitors, subscribers, and customers they receive.

During the interview, Wolf discussed some of the biggest mistakes marketers make when it comes to optimizing online marketing for their clients. She noted that over 60% of marketers optimize company websites based on intuition, rather than using formulas, resulting in poor A/B testing and lost customers. Because 40% of visitors abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, companies literally don’t have time to waste on inefficient marketing.

The following are some of the key points Wolf makes about how to better your company’s marketing using emotional triggers:

Reality Sucks.

Her words, to be clear. As much as we like to think they do, consumers don’t buy something just because it’s cool or new.

They buy it because they think the product is going to make them a better version of themselves, similar to a “leveling up” concept in a video game. They’re only going to purchase something that makes them more efficient, sexier, stronger, more comfortable, more organized, more appealing…whatever they want to improve.

Optimization is about overall strategy.

The most common form of A/B testing is to duplicate landing pages and change one thing. Wolf urges her clients to recognize that this is not the best way to test. Conversion optimization should be about the overall business strategy- not spending money to change one thing and “see how it goes”.

Utilize every aspect of design, even your color choices.

When describing a number of website case studies, Wolf mentioned the colors the companies used to portray their brand. One company used a tagline that implied their customers were smarter than others, and enforced this by using blue as the landing page background, which evokes emotions dealing with intelligence and wisdom. Another company, offering a dating service, used black as their background, and were able to successfully portray feelings of lust and mystery.

Know when to hold ‘em.

Know what to keep, what to remove, and what not to use in the first place. Specifically, Wolf recommended not using stock photos when possible (ask users if you can use their photos), not including too many call-to-action statements, and avoid saying too much with words if you can say it with images. On the flip side, she emphasized the importance of adding a strong CTA and lots of compatible psychological triggers (colors, images, words,etc.).

Most of all, Wolf accentuates how important it is to take advantage of the benefits of online marketing. In the offline world, there is a lot of emotional advertising, but it is almost impossible to track. In the online world, you can track emotional advertising and consumer behavior, so why wouldn’t you?