Empathy · Principle 05 of 16
Make people feel something
Nobody finds something with too many legs in the kid's bedroom and goes looking for a cheerful website.
Oli Gardner was walking me through a piece of Unbounce research, the sort with a very large number attached, when he stopped on the pest controllers.
The study had looked at 74 million visitor interactions with lead gen landing pages across ten industries, measuring reading ease, word count, sentiment and emotion. Oli sets it up here.
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Make people feel something
Pick the emotion on purpose. It isn't always joy.
"You probably don't want joy on a bug exterminator's website. You want some fear. You want some disgust."
> installed fear. uninstalled fear. spiders remain unsupported.
"You probably don't want joy on a bug exterminator's website," he said. "You want some fear. You want some disgust." And then, because Oli can't resist a visual, "these ugly mosquitoes or crazy spiders."
It's one of my favourite moments of the season. Most of us assume good marketing should make people feel good, and Oli was asking for disgust.
Happy isn't a default setting
Think about who lands on a pest control site. Someone who has just found droppings in the pantry, or a nest in the eaves, or something with too many legs in the kid's bedroom. They are not in a joyful mood. A smiling family on a sunny lawn doesn't meet them where they are. It tells them you're not really listening.
The spider photo does. It says: yes, that thing. We know. We deal with it.
Oli was careful about how far to push the data. The findings were signals from that set of pages, not a rulebook: "It's not, this is the way." Some of what came back was surprising. In travel, more angry words meant worse conversion. Some verticals wanted the simplest possible language, others wanted complexity, and a few wanted one or the other "but not in the middle".
HubSpot ran a longer write-up of the Unbounce emotion data if you want the detail by industry. Joy tended to help higher education pages. Too much of it hurt legal and home improvement. Fear hurt travel, health and legal, but a small dose seemed to help business consulting. Same emotion, opposite results, depending on who's reading and why.
Start with the feeling they arrived with
Nobody lands on your page emotionally blank. They were worried, or bored, or excited, or annoyed before they ever clicked. Your page either meets that feeling or argues with it.
This is where the principle leans on understanding the context. A search for "emergency plumber" at 11pm and a search for "bathroom renovation ideas" on a Sunday morning might end up with the same business, but they need completely different emotional handling. One wants calm and speed. The other wants to daydream a bit.
It helps to remember how little of this is rational. We pulled together the research in what neuromarketing can teach digital marketers, and most buying decisions get made well below the level where people read your feature table.
Feeling needs something to hold on to
There's a trap here. Once you accept that emotion matters, it's tempting to go all in: dramatic hero video, a headline that sounds like a movie trailer, sad music under the explainer.
Oli's answer on what matters most on a landing page was still clarity. People need to know what you do before they can feel anything useful about it.
The best emotional copy I've seen is usually quite plain. It names the problem the way the customer would name it. "Mice in the roof? We'll have them out this week." There's fear in there, and relief straight after. Unbounce still publishes its Conversion Benchmark Report, and the recent editions keep landing on the same thing: simpler, shorter copy tends to convert better, with the odd industry as an exception.
When we pulled apart what made Upworthy content spread, emotional images and stories kept coming up. More on that in tell a compelling story.
Start with your stock photos. If everyone in them is smiling at a laptop, ask whether your customer is smiling at that moment. Then have a look at your error pages. Most sites handle them with the emotional range of a parking ticket.
If you don't pick a feeling, you get the one the template came with, which is usually generic cheerfulness. Oli's full interview on kwasi.com has more on the emotion data.
Bobby's contribution to this part of the episode, just before the study came up, was that "melancholy marketing has been usurped by legions of hipsters." God, he misses the 80s.