Part 4: How to use touch to motivate your customers
Given an environment in which online purchasing is increasingly popular and deprives consumers of being able to touch the product before buying it, tactile marketing is a very interesting option. Online sales professionals are increasingly including the essential notion of tactile marketing by offering trial periods and free returns to enable touching. This gives customers the opportunity to touch the product and hold it in their hands. It enables them to get an accurate idea of its quality and to become familiar with it.
What’s more, tactile marketing appears to increase impulse buying. Expert marketing researchers have discovered that the stimulus created by touching, regardless if it is neutral or positive, has this effect.
However, they make a distinction between two types of touching:
- The instrumental need for touch: touching a product for the purpose of getting more information about it. For example, in the fruit aisle to see if the products are ripe or not ripe enough...
- The autotelic need for touch: the consumer wants to experience a sensation of well-being, of pleasure that will motivate them to continue touching.
What are the basic rules to use touch?
43. Put products close to the buyer, without any barriers between them, to enable handling. This can include shelving based on the average size of your target audience. However, letting your customers touch doesn’t necessarily mean leaving all of your products on the shelves or including fantasy textures in your displays. It simply means that you need to keep in mind the additional benefits of letting patrons touch the items and ensuring that this option is available to them in one way or another.
44. Add different materials, shapes and textures. This will provide the “cutaneous” sensation of the “need to touch” customers feel in a shop. For example, some bedding shops allow their customers to lie down on the mattresses to test their thickness, comfort and texture. As a result, price becomes somewhat secondary because the customer will tend to buy the mattress that feels best to them.
Touching can also be available via your website. Photos can give the impression of being palpable. For example, Emery&Cie reproduces this sensation via its photos of fabrics and tiling.
45. Set the temperature around 21°C in a restaurant and 23°C in a retail outlet. Tactile marketing also encompasses everything related to bodily comfort.
46. In the summertime, there should be cool air circulating in the shop and in winter, it should be warm air. You can also provide teas/herbal teas. This is the “thermal” aspect of the “need to touch” customers feel in a shop.
47. Use a range of floor coverings to attract customers and also to slow them down on the softer floors. Floor coverings are very important for the retail sales, hotel and recreation sectors where the indoor environment plays a significant part in the customer’s sensory experience. This will provide the “proprioceptive and “motor” sensation of the “need to touch” customers feel in a shop. For example, the thick red carpet in Sephora stores invites patrons to browse and helps to increase their feeling of well-being. Customers who enter the shop are encouraged to stay longer than in other shops, maximising the probability that they will buy.
48. Provide trial periods and free returns to offset the lack of touch on your online platform.
How to optimise your customer’s comfort
49. Cashmere is a soft, comfortable fabric and consumers usually feel protected and at ease when they wear it. Some brands have democratised cashmere by making it more financially accessible: Naf Naf, Kookai…
50. Tactile marketing can also be used to promote a service: make your customers want to come back by providing their hotel room with soft sheets and pillows and thick bath towels. You can be sure that the customer will feel good and enjoy their stay. In restaurants: the thickness of the serviettes, the weight of the cutlery and the comfort of the chairs will influence the perception customers have of your restaurant.
51. At the hairdressers or beauty salon: the furniture, decoration and equipment used such as, for example, the comfort of the chairs and green plants will contribute to the image and quality of service.
Chez Idyl Beauty, in Woluwé-St-Lambert
52. Put more emphasis on touching for customers with a visual impairment. Touch is one of the most important senses. Touch enables visually impaired people to find their way around, to identify what is around them, etc.
53. Inviting your customer to do something with their hands is an excellent way to get them involved! For example, have your customers take part in creating a work of art, in assembling a life-size puzzle, playing a board game or learning to mix and shake their favourite cocktail.
For example, the Sample Slow Jewelry workshop lets you make your own ring.
54. Adapt the materials you highlight to the seasons:
- Roots and recycled materials are conducive for sales seasons
- Velvet and lace are often featured on Valentine's Day
- Choose plant, fruit or vegetable veloutés for spring
- Christmas often means velvet, sequins and glitter
