As Valentine’s Day nears, you may be cranking up your digital campaigns and social outreach to woo new customers. During this season of love, your message has an opportunity to reach your customers on an emotional level, a great moment to establish a relationship with them.
Getting customers or clients to fall in love with you isn’t that different from dating — there has to be some chemistry to start, and from there it’s a process.
The love app
If you haven’t seen this post in the New York Times’ Modern Love section, To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This, give it a read. The author describes an experiment devised by psychologist Dr. Arthur Aaron who created a set of 36 questions that a pair of people who have never met can ask each other with the goal of falling in love.
The questions foster more and more intimacy as the couple moves through the list, from innocent first-date questions about what it would be like to be famous to deeper queries about your relationship with your mother.
The experiment has proven successful, resulting in marriage at times, but also, we can guess, at helping two people who might otherwise stumble into a relationship too quickly understand that perhaps they’re not right for each other after all.
Geek love
At eContext, we’re enthusiastic about the intersection between data and love, so it’s difficult to read about an experiment like Dr. Aaron’s without thinking of its parallels in our work. There are many approaches to digital advertising and social media that are the dating equivalent of throwing out a line at a bar on a Saturday night. You know the guys who tell you, “It’s a numbers game, and you just gotta keep at it.”
Then there are marketers who take a bit more time to really look at their audience segments and dig a level deeper to cultivate a more targeted message. This helps them weed out those who aren’t interested in the first place while creating a slightly better chance of wooing those who remain.
And then there’s the geeks like us who see the genius in Dr. Aaron’s method. Dig deep, gather all the information you can about your potential customers, and treat that data like a wonderful gift that will help you establish an intimate connection together.
Finding the love connection in customer data
You can’t speak directly to every customer, but eContext can help you pull customer data from any source and classify it into a unified structure that helps you weed out those unfortunates who will never fall in love with you. Access data on a deep, deep level — 21 tiers deep — to help you win the hearts and minds of those most likely to love you back.
Our text classification engine does this in real time because, let’s face it, you have to strike while the iron’s hot. We classify data to more than 450,000 interconnected categories. Just like Dr. Aaron and his 36 questions, you need to get specific if you truly want to understand people.
Our clients use our text classification system to make better decisions about how to reach out to customers and potential customers on social and digital channels. The structure that we give to their data helps them deliver better, more relevant ads, or place content just where it belongs.
At the end of Aaron’s experiment, the two subjects are asked to look into each other’s eyes for four full minutes. The idea is, you’ve accelerated the path to emotional intimacy and now you’re ready to really take a deep and thoughtful look at one another.
We help you accelerate the path to the staring-into-eachother’s-eyes moment. It’s up to you what happens next.
Happy Valentine’s Day from eContext.