15 September 2016
People are irrational and unpredictable. These are the facts that have been established by many researchers worldwide, including Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. However, all the business engagement strategies still assume that we think rationally and behave in accordance with our schedules. But the truly engaging incentives come from within the person: from emotions, feelings and unconscious decisions based on all of those. Here are few tips on how to engage your audience on a more subconscious level.
By nature, we are made in such a way that we want to explore everything by using all our five senses: smelling, seeing, tasting, touching and hearing. Obviously, sometimes it is impossible to appeal to all five of them (as in a case of website or telephone), however, when you get a chance, you should try to use as many as possible.
Look for passion! Facts are boring and non-interesting for others, especially if they are related to your company. However, if you can show your passion and enthusiasm, it would attract more attention, and people would be more likely to share your excitement with your products/offers.
Richard Branson said that once and lot’s of other research showed that when a brand has an enemy, all those intense relationships and associations with certain groups create an exciting competitive, and at the same time cooperative atmosphere between the consumers. Any call-to-action by the company would ensure maximum participation, especially if you have greater meaning/purpose to it.
This relates to loyalty programs, campaigns and any other programs and activities where you have to collect points, cups, or anything else. When you give people cards with the certain amount of points on them already, you give customers an incentive and motivation to come back and to continue participating in your program. Same relates to web platforms: if a user receives some credit (e.g. free disc space as in Dropbox) in the beginning, s/he is more likely to continue using the platform and would feel more attached to it.
If you want to get more people into doing/using something, ask them to do something easy first. This will decrease the ‘pain barrier’ after people would see how easy it was for them to do it. Next time, when you ask them to do what you planned in the first place, their associations would tell them how easy it would be, they would have some (even tho weak) attachment to the brand/company, so you are more likely to get more registered/involved users. Then it’s up to you to keep the dropout rate low.