Empathetic Marketing – Is It The Secret To Increasing Conversions? with Emily Lyman

00:00 Andy Splichal Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is empathetic marketing. Is it the secret to increasing conversions? Today's guest is the founder of Branch and Bramble, a lifestyle brand digital marketing agency that works with brands to employ empathetic marketing by balancing data insights with active listening and trust building strategies to grow sales. A big welcome to Emily Lyman. Hi, Emily.

00:31 Emily Lyman Hi, Andy. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I'm looking forward to it.

00:35 Andy Splichal Well, thanks for joining us. So let's start by defining empathetic marketing, what it is and why do you believe it to be so important?

00:42 Emily Lyman Yes, absolutely. So neuroscientist Antonio DiMazio shared, we are not thinking machines that feel, rather we are feeling machines that think. So we actually can't make a decision if we can't feel, which kind of goes against a lot of intuitive thinking, that a lot of people have had for quite a while. So empathetic marketing really recognizes, understands, and appeals to the role that emotions have in the decision-making process. And then this framework allows marketers to build customer journeys and experiences that improve customer satisfaction, trust, loyalty, lead qualities, and conversion rates.

01:27 Andy Splichal So focusing on type of emotional motivators, I mean, it's a bit different from an agency. Usually, people are looking to increase conversion through page speed or optimizing for other on-page factors. Yes, I'm curious, what led you down this path?

01:50 Emily Lyman Yes, so we like to say that empathetic marketing is actually inherently about conversions. So there have been several iterations of values-based marketing over the years, right? Me commerce, connect to consumer, the push for increased personalization. And so we've seen that these patterns have started to emerge time and again, higher performance metrics are seen with customer focused campaign. So that's not to say that you need to ignore, you should ignore your page speed and everything of that nature, you couple it with empathetic marketing, which looks at all the copy and messaging on that page that people are coming to, that's gonna be super fast loading. And then you throw in David Allison's work around the core human values, and you have a plethora of information to draw on. So based on these patterns and data, we were actually able to create a more systematic framework for scoring marketing communications based on empathy. And we've been able to prove over and over again, that improving this empathy score improves conversion rates even greater once you take all the kind of, I guess, low hanging fruit page speed, et cetera, into account.

03:08 Andy Splichal So what are some of these empathetic marketing strategies that you've been able to implement?

03:15 Emily Lyman First and foremost, we build our clients programs to really ensure that empathy plays a role in the complete consumer journey. So that starts with identifying and alerting our clients to their own bias and preferences, and then we help them refocus their data gathering efforts to uncover consumers' core emotional buying motivators and underlying values. They're not just asking questions, what product do you like best, et cetera, but the right questions. A great example of a brand asking the right questions is the beauty brand, Aliexpress. They have a find your routine quiz, and it goes beyond, which do you use more, mascara or eyeliner? They actually ask questions like, when it comes to beauty products, which would you benefit from the most? And the options are very value oriented, so it speeds up my routine. I want more bang for my buck. So we have a five step empathetic marketing process that we run our clients through from start to finish on their full marketing program to ensure that empathy is at every single level.

04:25 Andy Splichal So you're collecting this data through surveys on a website?

04:31 Emily Lyman There's a lot of different ways you can collect this data, right? So I mentioned David Allison, he has a company called Value Graphics, so you can kind of outsource that piece. You can, depending on what your resources are, right? As a brand and as a company, but you can also gather it through your first party data, any quizzes that you're taking, any surveys, any customer interviews you're doing, but you also can look for key words in the posts that your customers are posting, whether it be on social media, whether it be on reviews, whether it be on forums on the company website, look at customer service calls. I absolutely think that marketers should listen to customer service calls every once in a while, get to understand what people are saying. And when you pair all that data together, you can start to see those patterns around values and emotions emerge.

05:30 Andy Splichal So let's go through some examples of how you've been able to apply this collecting customer information into a brand's messaging.

05:39 Emily Lyman Yeah, so we recently went through this exercise with Patagonia, specifically their books division. And we paired our customer empathy scorecard with data around their consumers' values and applied our findings to their social media efforts. The one specific pairing, say of a buying motivator and a focus value that we tested was their customers really value experiences. That's really, really high as a core human value on their list. And then for one of the key buying motivators, right? There's nine key impactful buying motivators that studies have found to really move the needle with consumers. One of those is to feel a thrill. You can say that five times fast as a tongue twister. So we paired these two with experiences and then feel a thrill. And we worked in that messaging around several of their books that they published around mountain climbing and these really intense experiences and thrills that the authors have felt. And we saw a huge increase in engagement by 59% and then clicks by 104%. And we did it very specifically with this core words that we were choosing and using.

06:59 Andy Splichal Now, have you ever gotten where there was a surprise? I mean, I guess Patagonia, I mean, that's what I would think. I mean, and sure it's easy to say that afterwards, but you would think experience, right? That would be their customer base. And I would think that most businesses probably at least think they know what their customers want. But have you ever had a time where you've tested something and just got a complete surprise and had to shift a messaging of a company?

07:27 Emily Lyman Yes, well, actually I'd like to turn that question back over to you and ask you what you think the difference is in the demographics between Patagonia and North Face. What do you think the differences are?

07:37 Andy Splichal I would think, oh, now you're putting me on the spot. I like it. I would think that Patagonia would be younger and more, I don't know, off-road type. What more experience is North Face where North Face would be your weekend kind of camper?

07:59 Emily Lyman Okay, do you think that they share a lot of the same core values at the end of the day, like environmentalism, et cetera, et cetera?

08:11 Andy Splichal I would think Patagonia would be more environmentalist, North Face more comfort.

08:20 Emily Lyman I love it. So you're half right in that-

Oh, that's better than usual.

Emily Lyman So Patagonia and North Face, actually a lot of people think that while there's those little tiny differences of comfort and et cetera, they're both very similar in the target audience that they go after when actually they're very different. So Patagonia's core values of their customers, personal responsibility, experiences, job security, and then North Face is actually a sense of belonging and community, possessions, and financial security. So you actually have both two securities, but they're very different. And so that actually was very much a surprise in that when we came on with Patagonia, we did have to revamp their messaging to actually really hone in on that difference. So we focused less on, right? North Face focuses very much on their community, working with athletes, right? That are doing amazing things, whereas Patagonia is really, you have to hone in on that personal responsibility, grassroots activism, et cetera.

09:35 Andy Splichal Interesting. Now, did you handle both those accounts at the same time?

09:39 Emily Lyman No, no, we work with Patagonia, but we did. So we worked with Value Graphics. They are that company I keep referencing because they were able to pull those values for both of those companies and brands. And then we were able to use that data and information to employ the empathy framework.

09:58 Andy Splichal So where is a small business, let's say Patagonia is huge, let's say somebody's doing, I don't know, under half a million a year. I mean, where would they start as far as trying to get some of this information?

10:14 Emily Lyman There's a ton of places. And I have to start by saying, there are other studies, there are a lot of studies that actually show that marketers are terrible at empathy. And the more Dr. Johannes Hotula, he did a study with marketers that discovered the more empathetic they thought they were, the worse they were at predicting their customer choices. And so what he also found was once they were alerted to their bias and preferences, they were able to turn things around. So first and foremost, I would say brands and companies should start internally with their marketers and understand what their bias are, what their preferences are. You can go to Harvard's implicit bias project, take a test, and that kind of kicks it off and just have that in your brain of, I have this in my head, right? And then going back to what we kind of talked about a little bit previously is looking at your data, looking at the questions you're asking, looking at your customer reviews, those keywords, how consumers are talking about you on their forums, go to where your customers hang out and just listen. Don't engage in conversations, just listen to what they're talking about and listen with an empathetic ear. So there's active listening, which listens for comprehension. And then there's empathetic listening, which takes comprehension one step further to dig into the why of things and kind of start on that journey.

Andy Splichal How many businesses do you think employ this?

Emily Lyman I would say that probably 90% of companies believe that they employ it. What we have found is that the majority of companies don't actually have a systematic framework for employing it, right? They're in the camp of, I know what my customers want, I believe it to be true, and they're not taking that first kind of bias and preference into account. They're taking that bias and preferences step, and then they're not using a scoring method to say, hey, this is our marketing communication, does it hit all of these points within empathy? And then changing it accordingly.

Andy Splichal So what is the scoring method?

Emily Lyman So we at Branching Variable have come up with what we like to call the new empathetic marketing, and it is a five step process. And part of that process is the scorecard we developed called the Customer Empathy Scorecard. And it will take a look at your, you have to rank your marketing messages based on a scale of one to five, based on story, values, action, right? And it will look and say, and ask you very specific questions, are you looking at the emotions of your customer, or are you focusing on logic and reasoning? And they seem very, very basic, but you would be surprised because once marketers sit down and say, oh, wait, I have this question in my head, I'm looking at this message that I just put out, it doesn't talk to the client's emotions or the experience they're having at all. So it just kind of re-reframes that.

13:27 Andy Splichal So e-commerce companies always with their marketing, you know, are ROI driven. How do you show the ROI on this type of approach?

13:47 Emily Lyman So it'll go back to that example I just mentioned with Patagonia. We have a number of those where we can show, here's the A-B test that we did, right? Really going back to data, it's an A-B test, it's really easy, you only switch up the words or the messaging and you say, here it is without going through the empathy scorecard, here it is with the empathy scorecard, we saw, you know, in Patagonia's case, 104% increase in clicks. And we did it on the same social media posts, same picture, same amount of followers, same type of day, just different and same day, just like a week, you know, difference when nothing else going on, only the copy changed and we saw that huge increase. So we have a lot of those examples.

14:33 Andy Splichal So you had mentioned social media, is that where you're doing your testing and then you find that you can move it into the website based on that kind of testing, that messaging or?

14:43 Emily Lyman We do the testing across all different platforms. So it depends on the priorities of the client and what they're basically scoped for their program. We've done it with social media, we've done it with landing pages, right? A-B testing, landing pages is a breeze these days, looking at conversion rates from that, email marketing, you can A-B test those messages, A-B test subject lines, anything you can A-B test, we do it on essentially.

15:11 Andy Splichal Now for landing pages, just curious, now that Google has Sunset Web Optimizer, who are you using to test?

15:18 Emily Lyman Honestly, it depends on the client. So we work with different companies and tools based on the clients. Sometimes, for the most part, the bigger our clients, they have tools that they come in-house with.

15:36 Andy Splichal Got it. Yeah. So if you had a crystal ball, I always like to ask this, but where do you think the future goes in the next 12 to 18 months for e-commerce?

15:42 Emily Lyman No, I envision a larger focus placed on sustainability and overall social responsibility. It feels like a lot of people will say, oh, well, we're already there, right? But we're really only still at the tip of the iceberg. And so more and more brands are going to be called out for shady, oftentimes illegal business practices, and whether that's fast fashion that ends up in landfill, unsafe work environments. I think we're gonna see just more and more of that coming to the forefront. So I really hope that in the future, we see more brands that are held accountable and we continue to celebrate the ones that really uphold those values that protect the people, the environment. Can you tell them I already drink in the Patagonia Kool-Aid?

16:29 Andy Splichal Well, let's jump into you personally, Emily. Are there any business books out there that you can attribute to your success as an entrepreneur?

16:36 Emily Lyman I love The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz. It is less a business book and more a life book. So for me, the entrepreneurial journey is very much a roller coaster, right? I think anyone who has embarked on their own entrepreneurial journey just feels their attention being split a thousand different directions. And this book really helps bring me back to focus, helps keep me back in focus. And I am very much a self-criticizer as well. So it very much helps me tone that down so I can be proud of the work I do every day in a nutshell, a little personal there.

17:20 Andy Splichal Well, great. Well, let's talk about that work. Do you have a favorite success story of Branch and Bramble that you could share?

17:25 Emily Lyman Yeah, so we just won an American Business Award for Best Influencer Campaign of the Year with our client America's Best Racing, which is thoroughbred horse racing. And they are doing amazing work in the sport to ensure that these equine athletes are taken care of, they receive the best care, right? They've got bets on site, et cetera. So they're really working to change the industry for the better. And we're really excited to be a part of that. The brand ambassadors that we pulled for this campaign became thoroughbred racehorse owners and received a no obligation ownership stake in top performing racehorses. So we basically gifted them ownership of a racehorse. And it granted an inside all access look into horses preparation, care, competition from stable to starting gate. And so this campaign generated a 17% increase in brand and sport recognition, and then just helped bring awareness to the many, many aftercare programs that are working to make the sport better.

18:31 Andy Splichal Interesting. So who was, was it a specific racetrack that was the client? I mean, who was the client?

18:38 Emily LymanSo America's Best Racing actually is the client. They are the marketing arm of the jockey club. And they handle all marketing for all thoroughbred horse racing in the United States. And then within that, there are many different individual racetracks, but America's Best Racing is the umbrella.

18:59 Andy Splichal Got it. So on the flip side, what are some of the challenges that you guys go through where maybe you don't get the results you want?

19:13 Emily Lyman Yeah, I would say that this is really comes across when a client's needs are very rapidly shifting, right? And it is one of those, I mentioned focus when I mentioned the four agreements and my own personal focus, it's something that as a company with Branch and Bramble, we highly, highly prize and value and recommend within our clients is focus, right? A lot of times we're all distracted by really shiny things. So when a client's needs are rapidly shifting, if it's due to a change in a product launch or brand partnerships and it's constantly in flux, but at the end of the day, my team is, I have to kind of do this humble brag, I guess, where we are highly adaptable. And so we do quickly recalibrate our programs to really align with our clients' goals and outcomes.

19:56 Andy Splichal And who are your clients? I mean, who is the perfect client that if they're out there listening, they should reach out to you?

20:05 Emily Lyman Yeah, our sweet spot is lifestyle brands in the CPG space. So that's where we like to focus. That being said, I don't want to say we will turn, we're not gonna be like, we're not gonna have a conversation with you if you come knocking on our door.

20:27 Andy Splichal So, but yeah. And what problems are typically clients facing when they get on the phone with you?

20:32 Emily Lyman So a lot of times they are, it goes back to empathy, but they don't know that it's empathy, if that makes sense, or they can't, the verbalization, right? They come to us and say, hey, we want to build an audience. And a lot of times what they're looking for is not the quick audience, right? We narrow it down. They want that long-term audience that will grow and live with them for a lifetime. And that is how we work that through our values-based and empathetic marketing. So they're looking to really cultivate those meaningful relationships between their brand and their consumers.

21:11 Andy Splichal So are they looking to build a community then? Is that why they're coming?

21:16 Emily Lyman They're looking to build a community, but they're looking to do it smartly, right? Because a lot of times building a community can mean a lot of resources and a lot of bandwidth on the brand and company side. And they don't often, a lot of times they'll come to us and say, we know we need to build a community, but there's no ROI we can prove with a community. And so we help really bridge that gap to hard data.

21:42 Andy Splichal And so how does your, I mean, we're getting into ROI now, but I mean, how does your fee structure work?

21:49 Emily Lyman That is a great question. So we have both project-based and retainer-based services. And so while we do have kind of what you call standard packages, right? If you're looking just for social media or just for newsletters, I would say the majority of our clients actually don't do just kind of ones in silo channel of that nature. They really do find the most value in the custom scopes that we build based on their needs and budgets. And these can range anywhere from $5,000 a month upward to $50,000 a month. Our team is split. So we have an SMB team and we have an enterprise level team.

Andy Splichal And what is the best way for a interested listener to learn more about working with teams?

Emily Lyman Yeah, feel free to send me an email directly, emily@branchandbramble.com. I do answer my own emails and, you know, or follow me on LinkedIn. And of course you can visit our website

22:53 Andy Splichal at branchandbramble.com. Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

22:57 Emily Lyman If you don't mind, I'd like to make one small shameful plug. All right, let's do it. Not shameful, shameless plug. We do have a free ebook on our website to help marketers incorporate empathetic marketing in their programs. So this is a very great first step starting point. It has a lot of tidbits. It has a lot of tactical steps that people can start to take today. So if you just go to branchandbramble.com forward slash empathetic hyphen marketing, ou can download that ebook for free.

23:31 Andy Splichal Well, that's great. Well, thank you for joining us today, Emily.

23:34 Emily Lyman Thank you, Andy, so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

23:38 Andy Splichal For listeners, remember if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Branch and Bramble or connected with Emily, you will find the links in the show notes below as well as a link to the ebook that you mentioned. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center available at podcast.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and include each of their contact information in case you would like more information, any of the services I've discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing. And I'll talk to you in the next episode.