Adding Emotional Appeal to your Website

You may have heard that people make purchasing decisions based on emotions, and then justify their decision with logic. This is even true of B2B sales, where the final decision to offer a business your lucrative two-year contract may come down to your personal opinion of the people who work for that company (i.e. if you have a “gut feeling” about them, be it good or bad.)

Whether you’re in a B2B or B2C industry, making a great emotional appeal to your target audience is essential for gaining their business. Yet so many businesses miss the mark and end up coming across as deadly serious, robot-like entities, or pushy salespeople trying to trick their customers into buying something they don’t really need.

Before  you can give your website emotional appeal….

Giving your website the emotional appeal it needs to make your business come across as genuine, trustworthy, and committed to quality is no easy task, and a number of other things need to happen before you can even begin. You may recall when we discussed designing for a hierarchy of needs based on Smashing Magazine’s comparison of website design to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Emotional appeal is the very top tier of that hierarchy.

A website must be functional, reliable, and free of usability issues before adding emotional appeal will do any good. If you think of your website as a house, emotional appeal is the roof, and making sure your site can do everything it is supposed to do (i.e. collect leads, facilitate e-Commerce sales, etc.) every time anyone uses it, and that it is easy to use would be your website’s foundation and walls. Only when these tasks are complete should you start to worry about coming across as genuine online.

What you need to create genuine emotional appeal

There is a generally agreed-upon set of feelings businesses should try to engender in their target audiences via their websites:

• Positivity – your website should present your business as upbeat, comforting, and trustworthy in the eyes of your customers
• Surprise – your website should help your customers learn something new or discover something unexpected
• Uniqueness – your website should make your customers feel unique and special, and also feel that your company is unique
• Attention – your website should show your customers that they have your undivided attention and that you have their needs in mind
• Attraction – your website and its products or services should appear attractive and make your customers feel attractive too
• Anticipation – your website should entice your customers to keep coming back for more
• Exclusivity – your website should make your customers feel like part of a special group
• Responsiveness – your customers should be able to interact with you and see your reaction to others (they want to see that there is a human being on the other end of the website working to address their needs.)

How to create emotional appeal for your website

“Those are great goals for my website, but how do I go about accomplishing them?” you may ask. While the specific actions you take will depend greatly on your business and the type of customer you are hoping to attract, there are certain areas you may wish to focus your efforts on:

Mimic the emotions you want to solicit in your customers. If you show a picture of a person smiling your customers will feel the urge to reciprocate the smile, according to psychology studies. Niche Marketing PR can design custom artwork for your website to give it a more human, emotional look and feel.

Use humor. Humor is a great ice-breaker, and while it may not work for every type of business out there, adding touches of humor to your website’s content and/or imagery can go a long way towards making your site’s visitors feel more at ease. While we at Niche Marketing PR hardly consider ourselves stand-up comedians, we may be able to help you incorporate just the right amount of humor to appeal to your audience without falling flat and/or losing your professional demeanor.

Focus on your unsubscribe pages. If you send out e-newsletters or e-mail drip campaigns, try doing something unexpected on the landing page where customers will be directed if they wish to unsubscribe from your mailing list, like offering a free gift. Using humor on this page can also be a winning tactic. You may also be interested in our other suggestions for how to reach out to lost customers.

Tell a story. If your visitors can recognize and empathize with a story or scenario you share, and/or put a face and a name with your company, it can help make their interaction with your website feel more like a face-to-face conversation with a person, and thus, humanizes your company. Ask us about custom content writing for your website.

Try using dissonance. People expect your website to follow a pattern and be just like everybody else’s website. If it’s not, it can be a real attention-grabber. Just make sure your site doesn’t get so far from the norm that your customers can’t figure out how to use it. Ask us about how to avoid usability issues.

Keep customers engaged. Facilitate social media interactions such as one-click social sharing, add entertaining YouTube videos, and be sure to share content regularly on your business Facebook, Twitter, and other social media pages. We can help you manage all your social media accounts so you can devote your valuable time to more pressing matters.

The Ability Factor™ > Design-Ability > Adding Emotional Appeal to your Website