Taking Sensory Marketing Online

If you ever go into an Abercrombie and Fitch store it’s almost like walking into a night club with the music and the lighting, but the thing that stands-out most of all (well at least to me) is the smell. The place is filled with one of their fragrances that makes it unlike most other cloths shops I’ve been in. Even if you mail-order a product, the moment you open the box, there’s that scent.

Some supermarkets in Northern Europe are connected to bakeries by hundreds of meters of pipeline. The pipes carry the aroma of fresh bread to the stores’ entrances. Without even realising it, passers-by are struck with hunger and drawn inside the store.

Another example I heard about is at a major British bank that introduced freshly brewed coffee to its branches with the intention of making customers feel at home. The familiar smell relaxes the bank’s customers, not an emotion you’d normally associate with such an establishment.

All of these are examples of Sensory Marketing. A marketing method that targets your senses – sight, smell, sound, touch and taste to promote a product or service (as opposed to conventional marketing which usually relies on sight and sound alone).

Taking Sensory Marketing Online

Now you’re probably thinking – how can I possibly incorporate the different senses into a website when people can’t smell it, they can’t touch it, they can’t taste it… at best they can see it and perhaps by adding some audio to the site they will be able to hear it (which in my opinion can detract from the experience), but that’s about it.

Ok… so maybe it’s not possible to evoke the senses physically, but you can certainly appeal to all of these senses in an emotional and virtual way.

Take books for example. Authors have been capturing the imagination of readers for centuries and this is done through vivid and captivating descriptions. A good author can describe how cold it is on a winters morning and as you read it you feel a slight shiver. They can describe the pungent smell of a rotting corpse so well that it almost makes you feel ill. Another example is a recent blog post by Kimberly from Learning SEO Basics – she had me rather hot under the collar with her article Learn SEO Copywriting: mmm Make Love to Me.

Words can be a very powerful thing and if used correctly you can create a very strong impression that appeals to peoples senses and emotions. Once you have the reader mesmerized by your words, it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to then lead them to inquire about your products/services.

The next most powerful tool to words is imagery – as they say ‘a picture tells a thousand words’. Adding some great pictures to your website not only makes the page look more interesting, it strengthens the emotional message being delivered by the surrounding words. Not to mention providing much needed stimulation to those readers who tire quickly of long blocks of text.

The other thing that people often forget is that it can be possible to ‘touch’ a website. Once again, not in the conventional sense, but lets look at websites, blogs and other social media sites that:

• invite comments / feedback
• have you vote, respond to polls or submit content
• run competitions
• run awards that get users involved through nominations and voting

Anything that requires the user to interact with your site allows them to touch it and add their personal mark to your page. If you don’t run a blog or social media site, try something completely different – maybe have a flash game designed that somehow relates to your products or services. The moment someone starts to play, they are virtually ‘touching’ your site (not to mention the link-bait value if the game is good… but that’s a whole nother post).

These are just a few suggestions and ideas of how you can appeal to your reader’s senses and emotions through your website. While I technically haven’t done anything particularly sensational in this post, hopefully the ideas have been enough to get you thinking of how you can improve your online presence.