Episode 221 - Real Time Emotional Patterns

It's likely you have an innate skill you're not fully utilizing in your marketing -- the ability to see "real time emotional patterns" in the conversations your customers are having with you.

Listen in as Susan tells you about six "Real Time Emotional Patterns" she leveraged using technologies like webinars, live chat, online surveys and more to get "inside the mind of her prospect" to drive more conversions for her online self-help programs.

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and on today’s show I’m going to talk to you about real time emotional patterns. Now you might be familiar with conversion triggers. If you haven’t gone to conversiontriggers.com and watched a half hour PowerPoint presentation, a personal video, where I explain the four realms of persuasion marketing. I give you some cheat sheets and some PDF’s and some book excerpts and some of my favorite resources. You’ll know that if you’ve gone to Conversion Triggers that I’ve really been focused on the four realms of persuasive marketing – storytelling, copywriting, structured communication and neuro marketing. So I’ve been learning a lot about copywriting and storytelling, and working very diligently to write good copy that converts for my products. And in looking back at the last year, I realized that I’ve been doing this thing of seeing emotional patterns in the use of some technologies that I’ve been leveraging. And I wanted to tell you how I’ve been doing this because I think you could potentially be doing it too. And it’s interesting because, you know, I’ve been doing startup launches for 25 years. I’ve been in high tech marketing since the 80’s, and many of the companies that I’ve been associated with have been acquired by Yahoo and AOL. I was part of one of the largest Internet mergers of all time when we had At Home Network bought excite.com for $6.7 billion. I’ve also done a lot of go-to market positioning for early stage startups in the Silicon Valley and managed sales teams of hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue. So I’ve come out of this consumer web services and tech marketing world, and what I’ve noticed recently in understanding how to be more persuasive is that I have effectively, now that I’ve moved into information product marketing, you know, selling online home study courses directly to consumers, that I’ve got kind of the peanut butter of classic marketing and tech marketing and the chocolate of information product marketing, and they’ve come together in a way that had me look at something I was doing and want to share it with you.

Now this real time emotional patterns presentation that I’m giving you here today on DishyMix is a presentation that I gave at the Awesomeness Fest in Maui just recently. And so I had to put all this information together and I thought, “I need to share this with you my DishyMix listener.” Now here’s what I think: I think that information marketers have a greater opportunity to leverage emotion than pharma tech, CPG, auto, who come from a more traditional world of marketing. You know, information product marketers, they have something called masterminds where they all get together and they give each other their best secrets. Traditional marketers have, what, industry associations. You’re not working with your competition. There is no co-opetition or very little of it. In information product marketing, we do JV product launches where we all come together and cross promote our products together. What do you have when you’re in tech or CPG or automotive? You’ve got [inaudible] channels. You’re selling directly down through a single channel or a couple of channels. You’re not working with a bunch of partners all working together.

So in information marketing you get ahead when you trigger emotion. When you grab someone by the guts and you say, “I understand you and here’s what I know,” and you say, “Yeah, you get me.” In corporate America, you get ahead when you subdue your emotions. It’s hard for you as a marketer to get all excited or laugh or cry or go crazy in meetings. There’s a code of conduct that prevents you from really getting under the hood of your customers in some ways that information product marketers are allowed to do. They allow themselves to do it. And what I want to tell you is that the more you feel, the more you experience your customer’s life and your own life, the more emotion you open yourself to, the more you can excel not only in business, but the more you can connect intimately with your beloved and your friends. So I want you to think about seeking out emotional in your work. That’s the big idea; looking for real time emotional , using technology so that you can understand what the conversation is that’s in the mind of your customer. And when you speak to them with the copy that you write, the website content that you put up, the emails you send out, the content you post on Twitter and Facebook pages, how can you let your prospects know that you really do get them?

Well, and why now? I think there’s a perfect storm of forces that have aligned to allow you to get to these emotional patterns and harness them for the good of your business to help your prospects become your customers. First of all, economics. It’s harder and harder to sell products, you know? The economy is down, Yahoo and Google and Microsoft are constantly changing the roles about what they allow you to do online, you know, PPC’s gotten tougher to buy. It’s tougher to get SEO. Panda has created Pandemonium. The FTC is cracking down. Visa, MasterCard and Click Bank are changing their rules, you know, to comply with the FTC. And it’s darn easy to return things these days. Everybody has to take everything back, so anybody can buy anything even if they’re not sure. So we have a lot of economic forces that make it imperative for us to connect with our customers in ways we’ve never done to date. Also social has really changed things. Trust around big brands is eroding. Social media exposes us to criticism that’s often unwarranted, and on the other hand social listening tools are cheap and easy so we have them to leverage but we have to handle them now.

And there’s also this perfect storm of technology, so it’s not just that the economy is tighter and people are making more considered purchases and they’re returning things, but that we have to manager our brands and that we have technology capabilities like Olark, Stealth Seminar, Survey Monkey, Zen Desk, Google Website Optimizer and with exception of the last one on the list, they’re all one day implementation. They’re technologies that we can use so that we can speak to our customers in a way that is more emotional and less rational and helps them make their buying decision more easily. So I think you can tap into a rich vein of customer insights that will increase your conversions more quickly and more cheaply that you are probably overlooking now. I’m going to tell you the story of six real time emotional patterns that I’ve used in the last year for the product launch for Revive Her Drive, and maybe you’ll be able to help other people come to completion, you’ll be able to help them get their problem solved in a faster, more efficient way by looking at and finding these real time emotional patterns in your own business.

Now there are a lot of people that see patterns in numbers. Are you one of them? Can you look at a spreadsheet and see the patterns? Do you connect the dots with numbers? ‘Cause I don’t. But what I do is connect the dots in what I call a real time emotional pattern, and I think there are a lot of people out there – and maybe you’re one of them – who can hear five different customers say five different things that understand that at a sub context they’re all saying the same things. They’re all expressing the same frustration. They’re just using different words to express it. So that’s what I’m looking for here. I’m looking for the way my customers are talking back to me using different channels, collecting that information, looking at the sub context, boiling it down and telling it back to them in a way that they say, “Yeah, you get me.”

All right, first I want to give you a little back-story. This is real time emotional product number one. We saw a lot of advanced sexual and sensual mastery programs for couples, and Tim and I for the first two years of our business we took every customer support call. We wanted to understand what it was that people didn’t like or what they were having problems with or why the were returning. And what we heard over time was so many men returning a product, an advanced sexual mastery product because their wife wouldn’t let them do it with them. Even the wives would call and say, “I need to return this product immediately. I don’t know why we even have this. Get this off our credit card,” you know, ooh, somebody’s getting in trouble tonight. We realized that there was a market opportunity to help man on ramp new ideas in the bedroom with their wives and girlfriends, and that they needed help. They couldn’t just go from 0 to 60 miles per hour with their lady. They needed to get her engine going again. And we heard that even though they all said different things. We said, “Huh, what they need is a Revive Her Drive.” So we did real time emotional pattern number two, online surveys. We found using Survey Monkey that 81.7% of men on our customer list were in a relationship where they felt that they weren’t getting the level, the quantity or quality of intimacy and passion that they wanted in their relationship. We would ask them, you know, to use, you know, open-ended, you know, describe in one word your relationship, your sex life, and we got pages of wretchedness, you know. “I’ve given up hope. Rejection, it’s an iceberg. I’m bored. It’s non-existent.” And what we realized was this is how people are feeling inside, and we can use this strategy, these concepts to speak to them in a way that they know that we understand how they feel in the bedroom, in their relationship.

So online surveys was the second way that we found out what was happening in the minds of our customers. Real time emotional pattern number three is what I call clustered transcripts. What I did to come up with the product and to understand how to frame the problem and solve it, how could a guy rekindle his passion in his marriage or his relationship? I interviewed a dozen of my favorite sensuality experts, and I asked them in this series called The Seduction Summit, which is a core part of Revive Her Drive, I asked them how does a man rekindle his passion in his relationship? And all these experts said an hour worth of different things. I had all those audios transcribed. I printed them out on my printer and I’m sorry for the trees that I wasted, but it was for a really good cause, don’t you think? And I cut out with scissors the really sweet salient helpful valuable pieces of advice that these dozen experts gave me. And then I clustered them in groups like a cloud tag all over this giant teak conference table that I have in my office, and I covered that table with these clusters and blobs of likeminded thoughts. And then I looked at what everyone was saying about a particular thing, and I said, “Oh okay, they’re all using different words, but they’re all saying four different things.” No matter how I sliced it, there were four elements of revival. A guy could look at four things in his relationship and handle those one by one by one, some he could, some he might have to do with his woman. But that all these people in hours of information basically said one, two or three or four of those things. No one said them all, but they all said them ultimately. And that helped me figure out what the real situation was. So maybe that’s something that you can do is look for the patterns in what experts are saying and create more simple processes for people to follow.

Real time emotional pattern number four has to do with conversion optimization. I spent hundreds of hours writing the landing page copy for Revive Her Drive. I tested with Google Website Optimizer hundreds of headline strategies, all different ways to talk about this problem of wanting to have more passion and not knowing what to do. Everything that a guy had tried wasn’t working. You were talking to her hand. You saw the back of her pajamas in bed at night again and again and again. How am I going to talk to these guys and let them know I understand them? Well I tried a mystique, you know, love chemicals. I tried the sexless marriage angle. I tried the get more romance angle. And then I tried the passion angle with teaching men that there were four elements of revival and it wasn’t their fault because love chemicals like oxytocin naturally wane in a relationship in as early as two to four months and definitely within four years. You know that seven-year itch that people talk about? Scientists say now that it’s actually like a four-year itch, and it’s biological. So if a guy doesn’t intervene and he doesn’t have the tools to know what to do, he’s kind of destined for his sex life to get worse and worse, which is the last thing he wants, right? So I tested all these different landing page strategies, and I found out what it was that made sense to men. Let them know they didn’t do anything wrong. It happens to almost everybody, and there’s something they can do about it. But it took me four massive rewrites of strategy to figure that out. But I heard what they, how they were responding to what I was writing, and when it turned them off and when it got them engaged. So that really helped me dial in how to connect with my customer in a way that would be the easiest for them to deal with what is a very delicate and gut wrenching solution.

Now you might sell something that doesn’t quite have as much emotion, but I’ll tell you that there’s emotion in everything everyone markets. People buy on emotion and then they, you know, they justify with fact or, you know, with their rational mind. So here was the next thing I did and this was very interesting. Real time emotional pattern number five, when we launched Revive Her Drive we had a pre-launch webinar. You could go listen to a webinar called Lust Triggers, and we used a technology called Stealth Seminar. We still do it; it runs to this day and it’s a fantastic converter for us. When you’re taking this seminar, when you’re in the webinar and you’ve signed up, whether you’re watching it as a replay or you’re watching it live at 6PM three nights a week, there’s a chat window just below the webinar and you can ask any questions that you want. Well when we have hundreds of thousands of people flowing through our website, you can imagine the kinds of questions we get. We also use that same kind of strategy on our website. We use Olark on our website and I’ll come to that as well, but both of them are chat windows that allow anyone who is engaging with our content to ask us questions. And when we first launched our webinar, we had promised in the email that got you there that there’d be no pitch, but then we made an offer at the end of our webinar, and people just threw up over that. And the first night we launched that webinar so many people complained, “You told us there was going to be no pitch and then you tried to sell us something at the end,” and then we’re like, “Oh yeah, we did. That probably wasn’t a good idea. We better change that email and change that webinar.” We changed it overnight, and those comments went away, and then they could get past that and ask the real questions that they wanted to ask about themselves and how this applied to their life.

So using the Stealth Seminar chat window, we were able to see real time emotional patterns of a problem we had with our content that was creating mistrust that we would have never known about had we not been looking for that information. Interesting thing too, just before the cart opened on our product launch, one of my hotshot JV partners, whose a fantastic copywriter, called me up and he said, “Are you serious? This is what you want me to send out? This isn’t going to work for my list. What are you doing? You should have called me and had me fix this stuff for you,” and I was like, “Oh my god.” It got me so upset because I was like, “Oh no, what did I do wrong?” Now I had tested all that swipe copy, the prewritten emails my partners used and mailed out. And I know direct marketing ratios; it’s 40% irresistible offer, 40% whether the list of people you’re mailing to is appropriate and 20% your copy. So even if it wasn’t perfect, I had done so much testing that I knew I knew the right angle to connect with my guy, ‘cause I have a ton of empathy for a man who wants a passionate marriage and isn’t getting it. And what I realized is that the guy, the hotshot JV that called me up and wrote his own email, his email didn’t convert because he missed that empathic capability. He twisted the knife. He made his guys feel bad. There was overt sexuality in his emails. I had already tested all that, and I knew that didn’t work. And so once you start to get the emotional patterns, you know what’s going on in the mind of your customer. These kinds of, you know, phone calls won’t rattle you. You’ll be very confident in your ability to understand your customer and be in service to them in a way that you haven’t been before.

I’ll give you an example too. When you have a great relationship and you really get your customer, it shows. My number one JV partner for my product launch on Revive Her Drive had a list of 6,000 people and he sold 80 units in four days. 6,000 people bought 80 units. My number two partner has a list of over 400,000 names and he only sold 70 units. So it really, really makes a difference when you’re getting deeply into your customer’s needs.

All right, real time emotional pattern number six, remember when I talked to you about Stealth Teleseminar and the live chat window? Well we also have one of those on our website, and when our customer support people are there – now we’ve got a customer support person, Micah, she logs in when she gets into work, and then we log in when we get to work, and anyone, if we’re logged in that chat window’s available on our website, and anybody who comes to our website and has a question can ask us a question. Well while hundreds of thousands of people were running through our site during our product launch, we were answering questions like crazy and I saw emotional patterns in the questions. And I learned things that were in the minds of my customer that I would have never known. For example, so many people from 18 to 80 asked me, “Am I the right age for your product?” Listen, if you’re in a relationship and you want more passion, you’re the right age, right? But I never said that in my copy. People wanted to know, “If my woman went through menopause, would this help?” “My partner is preventing me from having this experience I want. Could I have this experience if I used your product?” “I want to know if my woman’s really truly excited about being with me. How can I tell?” “I want my woman to initiate more with me. Will this product help me?” What I realized is that I hadn’t answered all the questions about whether or not my product would work for these kinds of very common use cases. These were things that hadn’t occurred to me until I used Olark and got questions from people all over the world, and saw that they were all asking me six basic things. And then I was able to take those questions and turn them into answers in emails and put them into my auto responder series so that over time my prospects got all the answers that they thought of and things they didn’t even think of that would move them to yes so I could help them.

What was also great was that when people purchase the product the next day I started getting unsolicited amazing testimonials, and I was able to feed those back into my auto responder as well and increase my conversions again. Guys were saying things like, “I bought your product last night, and just listening to the first audio made me want it again, made me want to connect with my woman, made me work for it in a way I hadn’t, and we had the best lovemaking we’ve ever had last night. Thank you so much. I can’t wait to listen to the rest.” Or, “I got my wife’s nightie off for the first time in 20 years. Thank you.” Or, “I just talked to my wife after using Revive Her Drive, and I’ve gone from having sex one time a week, she said she’ll now have sex with me three times a week. I can thank you for 300% increase in my sex life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” These are the most amazing things that when you enter into this conversation with your customer, when you really get them and you have the confidence to have these conversations with them, it can just be incredible.

So I want to encourage you to use any or all of these technologies, whether you use Olark or Stealth or Survey Monkey or Google Website Optimizer – whatever you use, including all the social listening tools that you’re probably using, I encourage you to pull out that emotion and look for those emotional patterns, and then leverage those in your copy to connect better with your customer, ‘cause I think you’ll see patterns. You likely have this skill already inherent inside you as a marketer. You’re probably a very articulate person and able to really communicate effectively. And I think that most business professionals are overlooking these easy to use tools that can seriously give you a considerable advantage in your conversion optimization. What’s great is that all the tools are available now and they even work for tech tards like me, and you can better monetize the traffic that you struggle to get, that you pay good money and all your time to get. You can better optimize it. And ultimately, you can convert more prospects to customers. You can bring others to completion by helping them have a better life using your products or services, and by understanding them more deeply and by feeling the emotion, you can start to open yourself, your heart, not only to your customers, but to the people that you work with and the people that you love and the people that you interact with everyday.

So there you go, real time emotional patterns. I hope that this has helped you, and if it has or if you have any questions, you can communicate with me through my Facebook fan page. It’s just DishyMix. Just search for DishyMix and you’ll find me. I’d love for you to become a fan of the show. I’d love to hear your questions and comments, and it’s been awesome to connect with you today. I hope this has been fun and valuable for you. I look forward to connecting with you again on an upcoming show. And I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Have a great day and take care. Bye-bye.

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and on today’s show I’m going to talk to you about real time emotional patterns. Now you might be familiar with conversion triggers. If you haven’t gone to conversiontriggers.com and watched a half hour PowerPoint presentation, a [inaudible] video, where I explain the four realms of persuasion marketing. I give you some cheat sheets and some PDF’s and some book excerpts and some of my favorite resources. You’ll know that if you’ve gone to Conversion Triggers that I’ve really been focused on the four realms of persuasive marketing – storytelling, copywriting, structured communication and neuro marketing. So I’ve been learning a lot about copywriting and storytelling, and working very diligently to write good copy that converts for my products. And in looking back at the last year, I realized that I’ve been doing this thing of seeing emotional patterns in the use of some technologies that I’ve been leveraging. And I wanted to tell you how I’ve been doing this because I think you could potentially be doing it too. And it’s interesting because, you know, I’ve been doing startup launches for 25 years. I’ve been in high tech marketing since the 80’s, and many of the companies that I’ve been associated with have been acquired by Yahoo and AOL. I was part of one of the largest Internet mergers of all time when we had At Home Network bought excite.com for $6.7 billion. I’ve also done a lot of go-to market positioning for early stage startups in the Silicon Valley and managed sales teams of hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue. So I’ve come out of this consumer web services and tech marketing world, and what I’ve noticed recently in understanding how to be more persuasive is that I have effectively, now that I’ve moved into information product marketing, you know, selling online home study courses directly to consumers, that I’ve got kind of the peanut butter of classic marketing and tech marketing and the chocolate of information product marketing, and they’ve come together in a way that had me look at something I was doing and want to share it with you.

So in information marketing you get ahead when you trigger emotion. When you grab someone by the guts and you say, “I understand you and here’s what I know,” and you say, “Yeah, you get me.” In corporate America, you get ahead when you subdue your emotions. It’s hard for you as a marketer to get all excited or laugh or cry or go crazy in meetings. There’s a code of conduct that prevents you from really getting under the hood of your customers in some ways that information product marketers are allowed to do. They allow themselves to do it. And what I want to tell you is that the more you feel, the more you experience your customer’s life and your own life, the more emotion you open yourself to, the more you can excel not only in business, but the more you can connect intimately with your beloved and your friends. So I want you to think about seeking out emotional patters in your work. That’s the big idea; looking for real time emotional patters, using technology so that you can understand what the conversation is that’s in the mind of your customer. And when you speak to them with the copy that you write, the website content that you put up, the emails you send out, the content you post on Twitter and Facebook pages, how can you let your prospects know that you really do get them?

Well, and why now? I think there’s a perfect storm of forces that have aligned to allow you to get to these emotional patterns and harness them for the good of your business to help your prospects become your customers. First of all, economics. It’s harder and harder to sell products, you know? There’s the economy is down, Yahoo and Google and Microsoft are constantly changing the roles about what they allow you to do online, you know, PPC’s gotten tougher to buy. It’s tougher to get SEO. Panda has created Pandemonium. The FTC is cracking down. Visa, MasterCard and Click Bank are changing their rules, you know, to comply with the FTC. And it’s darn easy to return things these days. Everybody has to take everything back, so anybody can buy anything even if they’re not sure. So we have a lot of economic forces that make it imperative for us to connect with our customers in ways we’ve never done to date. Also social has really changed things. Trust around big brands is eroding. Social media exposes us to criticism that’s often unwarranted, and on the other hand social listening tools are cheap and easy so we have them to leverage but we have to handle them now.

And there’s also this perfect storm of technology, so it’s not just that the economy is tighter and people are making more considered purchases and they’re returning things, but that we have to manager our brands and that we have technology capabilities like Olark, Stealth Seminar, Survey Monkey, Zen Desk, Google Website Optimizer and with exception of the last one on the list, they’re all one day implementation. They’re technologies that we can use so that we can speak to our customers in a way that is more emotional and less rational and helps them make their buying decision more easily. So I think you can tap into a rich vein of customer insights that will increase your conversions more quickly and more cheaply that you are probably overlooking now. I’m going to tell you the story of six real time emotional patters that I’ve used in the last year for the product launch for Revive Her Drive, and maybe you’ll be able to help other people come to completion, you’ll be able to help them get their problem solved in a faster, more efficient way by looking at and finding these real time emotional patterns in your own business.