Abiola Salami is a performance strategist (CHAMP) providing valuable insights to high-performing professionals, entrepreneurs & politicians.
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Organizations are always looking to increase their customer base by attracting new demand for their products and services. Using the sales funnel, they deploy numerous strategies to move a prospect from the point of awareness to taking action on the same product.
With rival brands also competing for a larger chunk of the market share, emotional intelligence comes in as an effective tool in creating a distinct approach for any such organizations that seek to drive customer acquisition.
Experts say that emotional intelligence enables businesses to anticipate prospects' needs, gauge prospects' openness and guide prospects with compassion toward making a decision to onboard.
Since most buying decisions are made from a place of emotions and justified by logic, the science of customer rationale must be understood and applied appropriately. Adopting these four emotional intelligence insights could deliver the desired results.
1. Use the right channel.
After identifying who and where your prospective customers are, the next thing is to figure out the best medium to use in engaging them. There are some platforms that are more effective than others when it comes to reaching certain demographics. Based on the target market, you need to adopt a platform where you can easily reach your prospects. For example, radio and television reach certain types of audiences; the same is true with digital media or newspapers. This is because when people are already emotionally attached to a platform, it’s easier to influence their buying decisions.
Younger people tend to use newer media platforms, and the older population tends to go more with traditional platforms. TikTok recently has proven to be a platform where brands can get the biggest engagements from prospective and existing customers alike because numerous skits and entertaining challenges make it much easier for content to go viral. For example, legendary Nigerian music producer Don Jazzy uses TikTok to promote new projects by the artists on his record label, Mavin. Using this emotionally intelligent strategy, "Bloody Samaritan," a song by one of his signees, Ayra Starr, has gone viral.
2. Use tasters; give just the tip of the iceberg.
There is such a thing as buyer’s remorse: when customers have a not-too-good feeling after purchasing a particular good or service. So there is a degree of risk-aversion from prospects, and your job is to help them manage such risks. It is empathy when you acknowledge the valid concerns of those who may seem hesitant to sign up for your products. One thing you can do is, as much as is feasible, offer trial versions or free samples of the product you’re selling. A trial version of your product is an opportunity for a prospect to ascertain your value proposition at no cost to them personally; it also shows how much you rate your prospects and how far you’re willing to go in acquiring their patronage.
When I released my book, The Magic of Emotional Intelligence, many prospects who hadn’t known me well enough nor the superior value I was offering developed cold feet—they were not sure that the book would be worth the hype. What I then did was to make one chapter from the book available for free download on my website. Just like clockwork, the numbers of sales shot up—driven by those whose concerns were addressed by the access to a sneak peek of my book.
Prospects have needs competing for their limited resources; offering them a slice of the pie at little or no cost is an emotionally intelligent way of acquiring customers.
3. Apply horizontal integration of your offerings.
Just as businesses leverage social capital from their pool of existing customers to attract new customers, they can also leverage the goodwill or popularity of their more established products to attract new customers. It is a great multi-product strategy that organizations with great marketing experience use; they introduce or advertise new products alongside those with notoriety. The idea is that the trust and likeness that people have for the older products will be transferred to the newer ones. Through the lens of emotional intelligence, this can be seen as teamwork, especially when subsidiaries of the same parent organization collaborate to boost the sales of one another. Just as this is done on an intra-organizational basis, it can also be done on an inter-organizational basis in a bid to attract new customers.
One popular example of this is what Meta (formerly trading as Facebook) has done with Instagram and WhatsApp. After acquiring both companies from their owners, Meta automatically became their parent company and consequently integrated horizontally. That is why Facebook users can link their accounts to Instagram and WhatsApp respectively. WhatsApp now has an updated version that includes the signature “WhatsApp by Meta”—a move designed to draw upon the successes of Meta in driving customer acquisition.
4. Expand using mergers and acquisitions.
Sometimes, organizations can acquire customers outright by merging with another brand, thereby inheriting their customer base. This may come in form of acquiring a significant stake, sometimes enough to warrant a total change in brand identity. When an organization realizes that a rival brand has a very vibrant customer base and it cannot necessarily win them over with aggressive marketing, it can take the route of acquisition. Smaller brands usually have challenges with securing huge capital outlay but they don’t lack innovative ideas—which ensures that they can compete favorably with those organizations with larger war chests. This is an example of the social awareness element of emotional intelligence; recognizing the strength of other brands makes organizations take this path to drive customer acquisition.
As an example, one of the largest banks in Nigeria is Access Bank. (Full disclosure: I serve as a faculty member at Access Bank's training school.) A few years ago, Access Bank took over Diamond Bank and consequently inherited its customer base; this made Access Bank one of the banks with the largest customer bases. They didn’t have to spend money on advertising; rather they bought a significant stake in Diamond Bank, which earned them more account holders.
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