Why emographics matter for marketers

A yellow neutral face with open eyes, orange frowny face with open eyes, red neutral face with closed eyes, purple frowny face with close eyes, and a darker green smiley face with closed eyes are clustered against a light green background. There's a magnifying glass over the green smiley face. How well do you know your target audience?

As a professional marketer, you’ve probably already defined the personas you want to reach with your campaigns in terms of demographics – e.g., age, gender, and ethnicity. In recent years, companies have also realized the importance of segmenting by psychographics, which describe people’s interests and viewpoints, according to the Harvard Business Review.

Psychographics shed more light on people’s reasons for making purchases, the Review explains. For example, a parent’s decision to buy an iPad for their toddler can have more to do with feelings about screen time for young children than other factors like income level or age.

Understanding why people make decisions allows us to craft more effective marketing campaigns than simply knowing who they are in terms of demographic data. It’s possible to dig even deeper than psychographics with another category of data: emographics.

What are emographics?

For decades now, marketers have endeavored to comprehend what’s going on inside customers’ heads to better understand their behavior, Esther-Mireya Tejeda, CMO of Anywhere Real Estate, said in a LinkedIn Live session hosted by Marketers on Fire earlier this year. Neither demographics nor psychographics have produced a satisfactory answer to that burning question: Why do customers do what they do?

Emographics expose the motivations behind consumer actions in terms of their feelings, enabling more granular segmentation, Tejeda explained. In an article for AdWeek, she defines emographics as involving “the segmentation of consumers based on subconscious emotional profiles.”

Why emographics matter for marketing professionals

At a time when customer experience (CX) is a make-or-break factor for businesses, gaining an in-depth understanding of how your target audience feels and what motivates them to buy (or turn to the competition) is extremely valuable. Emographic data supports movement away from the “spray and pray” approach and generic one-size-fits-all campaigns that make people’s eyes glaze over and inspire them to send texts, emails and other outreach attempts to the trash.

“We have to move as marketers into really precise marketing,” Tejeda said. “We can spend less and actually get more if we’re just spending our money targeting the right people at the right time.”

Additionally, if you’ve ever gotten misty-eyed while watching a commercial, you understand the power of tugging at people’s heartstrings with advertising and marketing campaigns. If you move people emotionally, you’re also more likely to move the needle on your corporate goals: A Nielsen study found ads with the best emotional response drove a 23 percent increase in sales volume.

While we like to think we make decisions for rational reasons, 95 percent of our decisions about what to buy are driven by subconscious emotions, Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman found when studying consumers’ unthinking physical reactions, according to Inc. Knowing how people feel – rather than who they are or what they think – is the key toHow emographics can enhance marketing successful marketing and sales.

In her AdWeek article, Tejeda cites Domino’s solution to “pizza anxiety” as an example of leveraging emographics. After receiving frequent phone calls from customers inquiring about order status, the brand realized that people get stressed waiting for their pizzas to arrive. Subsequently, the company launched a pizza tracker that provides real-time updates on your order’s progress from prep to delivery.

Once you’ve identified relevant emographics like pizza anxiety for Domino’s, you can utilize tools like artificial intelligence and smart chatbots to deliver better experiences. For example, AI-powered chatbots often prove extremely convenient for customers who want to quickly perform simple tasks like checking the status of their orders.

How to research emographics

Aside from drawing conclusions from common behaviors like Domino’s did, how can you define the emographics of your current and prospective customers? The solution involves neuroscience and neuromarketing, Tejeda said.

She recommends working with behavioral scientists and neuroscience research firms to explore your target audience’s subconscious. These firms can utilize techniques like implicit association and metaphor elicitation to illuminate people’s buried emotions and motivations.

“As marketing is redefined in the context of today’s digital-first, tech-driven world, we must double down on marketing’s unique added-value: knowing the customer,” Tejeda wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.

If you want to explore technologies that support better experiences and facilitate greater insight into customer journeys, our team of advisors can help. We maintain partnerships with best-in-class suppliers of AI, customer relationship management (CRM), and contact center solutions.

Get started by calling 877-599-3999 or emailing sales@stratospherenetworks.com.

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