In today’s world, empathetic messaging is critical for your brand.
Your voice, your content, how often you communicate – all of these considerations must include empathy during difficult times.
Consumers agree. People believe it is more important than ever for brands to demonstrate empathetic qualities. In fact, one recent study reports that:
90% think that brands need to show empathy.
86% think that showing empathy is critical to creating greater customer loyalty.
However, the study also reports that 80% of consumers feel that brands are missing the mark.
Marketers need a solid communication plan right now. In order to design a plan that will communicate with empathy, ask yourself a few questions:
What is important to our customers?
How do we provide support and empathy for our customers?
What additional steps can we take?
Rather than guessing at these answers, AI can help.
Yes, that kind of AI. Artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence can help marketing teams behave with more humanity. Seems counterintuitive, but it’s true.
How AI Can Help
One of the most formidable challenges for marketing department crafting messaging during times of crisis is addressing the needs of different groups of consumers. These groups have different pain points, needs and wants.
AI can help gather the appropriate data to organize and visualize information and uncover trends about those pain points, needs and wants of various groups.
And it doesn’t end there.
Many automated tools exist to help marketers leverage all of that data to craft custom messaging for mass communication. By personalizing the content, the frequency and even the timing of delivery, AI takes the guesswork out of these types of decisions by providing data-driven answers and actionable steps forward.
When marketing departments tap into such insights, they can operate in a more proactive manner in order to provide the very best customer experience.
Three Ways to Begin Leveraging AI for Empathy
1. Send emails at the most convenient times and with the right frequency
Data is being gathered about all of us every second of every day.
If you can put aside the fact that this is scary, you can use it to your advantage in reaching consumers at times that are most convenient for them.
With Send Time Optimization tools, it becomes easier to leverage data about the recipient to understand when they are most likely to read your emails.
Being considerate of your potential and current customers is a demonstration of empathy. When you send your emails at just the right time, the following is likely to happen:
Recipients feel less burdened by your emails – almost like you’re on the same page.
Your emails arrive at a time when the recipient is most likely to open them.
Emails are optimally placed at the top of the recipient’s inbox.
Employees save time and deploy their efforts to more productive issues, like creating content with empathy!
Even if you strike the right chord with your timing, you also need to consider the frequency with which you are contacting customers:
AI can power dashboards that display engagement at various times.
AI can suggest optimal frequency ranges to maximize engagement.
From there, you can create segments based on the insights from the dashboard.
Send strategies can be appropriately customized for over-engaged and under-engaged subscribers.
2. Evoke emotion by incorporating the right language
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. When marketers can measure campaign performance, they can be more effective.
AI extracts actionable sentiment analysis insights that can improve the customer experience by:
providing information and trends about consumer reaction to particular messaging strategies
using language analysis to go beyond simple topic detection to examine the impacts of various tones, words and phrases
Once you understand the variables that create empathic messaging and resonate best with audiences, you can optimize your content accordingly.
3. Personalize content at scale
At the end of the day, empathy is really all about content.
Displaying the right combination of words and images to a specific audience as they open your email can be extremely powerful.
AI can help craft empathetic content and imagery through machine learning.
For example, consider the difference in approach for groups in areas where shelter-in-place restrictions are in effect compared to groups where no such restrictions exist. AI can filter and separate those audiences and direct the right content and imagery to the right audience.
Final Thoughts
When AI does the heavy lifting, your marketing teams can get busy doing more meaningful work to connect your brand with consumers.