Emotional Intelligence in Marketing for 2025: Tools and Tips

Feeling and processing your feelings each day is normal. In fact, regulating your emotions and being aware of how you react to them contributes to your emotional intelligence. 

Emotional intelligence (aka emotional quotient, or EQ) is the ability to identify, use, and manage emotions in a positive way.

Compared to strictly logical marketing that focuses on price and benefits, emotional intelligence in marketing speaks to the deeper why behind a purchase. It aims to create experiences that customers value while building advocates who believe in your brand. 

Ahead, you’ll learn the foundation of emotional intelligence (EI) in marketing and how to use it in your business. 

The business case for emotionally intelligent marketing

Consider your own experiences as a consumer. You’ve likely been drawn to a company with a compelling founder story. Or you trust a brand that writes authentic, empathetic marketing emails. Maybe you bought a product from a brand that supports a charity you care about. 

Customers' emotions drive sales. In fact, Deloitte notes that 80% of purchase decisions are driven by emotion—proving that human-centered messaging beats a purely logical campaign any day. 

On top of that, customers expect brands to respond to these emotions. Adobe’s 2025 Digital Trends survey found that 71% of consumers want brands to anticipate their needs with personalized offers, yet only 34% of brands deliver.

In a marketplace saturated with products and ads, what makes a customer choose one brand over another? Often, it’s not the product’s features themselves—it’s the feeling your brand evokes. 

In practice, emotional intelligence marketing includes: 

• Defining your brand values and image, including tone of voice, visuals, attributes, and personality in a way that resonates with a target audience.
• Managing how your brand shows up through asset management, experiences for customers (customer service, marketing materials, or activations), and building customer loyalty.
• Listening to and responding empathetically to customer needs through social listening, emails, and product feedback as part of a meaningful dialogue.
• Creating a safe relationship by showing genuine care for the customer experience—whether that’s online traffic, in-store visits, or everyday interactions—and meeting their needs to build an emotional connection.

What is emotional intelligence marketing?

Emotional intelligence marketing builds trust with customers through empathy by understanding their needs and presenting brand value authentically. It’s the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of your customers. 

Emotional intelligence marketing examples include: 

• Targeted, personalized emails with specific product information based on a customer’s past purchases or engagement
• Social media engagement, like responding to queries and concerns via Instagram DMs or posts on X (formerly Twitter)
• Reposting and engaging with customers and influencer reviews
• Using influencer marketing to select brand ambassadors who support the brand’s goals and bring their own authentic voice to audiences
• Self-reflective content like blogs, announcements, or social posts that share how you’re improving products or experiences for customers
• Genuine curiosity about different customer personas and stories

Core components of emotional intelligence

According to psychologist Dr. Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence consists of five components: 

• Self-regulation: Managing your brand’s communications so they remain kind, respectful, and consistent 
• Empathy: Truly understanding your customer's perspective, including challenges and desires 
• Social skills: Engaging with customers thoughtfully and compassionately, especially when handling feedback or resolving issues
• Motivation: A genuine passion for serving your customers and solving their problems that extends beyond just revenue and profit
• Self-awareness: Having a clear understanding of your brand's identity, values, and emotional impact (What do you stand for? How do your messages make people feel?)

For businesses on Shopify, it’s easy to integrate these components into your enterprise marketing strategy:

• Use customer profiles and segmentation to understand how your customers feel. Gather and analyze data on purchasing behavior, order history, and preferences. Then, segment your audience and tailor messages that resonate. 
• Communicate your authenticity and self-awareness. Shopify’s themes help you share narratives that highlight your brand's values, mission, and the people behind it. 
• Use Shopify Inbox to manage communications. Paired with Shopify Magic, an AI tool trained on your business data, your communications stay thoughtful and consistent. 
• Motivate and create value for customers with loyalty programs. Implement unified loyalty apps that customers use online or in-store. 
• Integrate your store with platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Create seamless experiences for customers on any social platform. Engage through email and SMS marketing with apps like Klaviyo that connect directly to your Shopify admin.

How EI influences ecommerce and marketing outcomes

EI wins the hearts of your customers. But that’s not all—it also improves revenue and brand equity. Here’s how the numbers line up:

• Stronger brand affinity: When shoppers feel emotionally connected, 66% say they’re proud to associate with a brand and 69% trust it to “do the right thing,” according to research from Merkle. 
• Revenue multipliers: Companies that align brand experience (BX) and customer experience (CX) see a 2.3x revenue lift versus improving either in isolation, according to Forrester’s 2024 CX Benchmark Survey.
• Founder-led resonance: Beauty brand Glamnetic leaned on Ann McFerran’s relatable scrappy start-up narrative and hit $50 million in revenue in their first year.

Ultimately, treating your customers like the people they are directly benefits your business. Brands that have great customer service skills, brand activations, and social engagement—and offer other positive shopper experiences—are far more likely to turn browsers into buyers.

AI and sentiment analysis tools to operationalize EI

Seeing how important EI is, you’ll want to adopt tools that help you gather and analyze customer data. 

The right tools capture emotional signals continuously, so you are never left guessing how customers feel about your brand. With real-time sentiment analysis, you can detect pain points, personalize outreach, and cut churn before it happens. 

Some tools that’ll help include:

• Social listening dashboards: Platforms like Brandwatch and Sprout Social monitor mentions and tone shifts across social media channels. If sentiment scores drop, you can address issues internally or in direct response to customers. 
• Review and voice-of-customer (VOC)-mining: Tools like Yotpo Insights and Okendo AI analyze reviews to uncover insights that enhance each customer touchpoint. For example, you might spot fit issues in a shoe line and correct them in the next run. 
• Support channel sentiment: If call center or chat transcripts show signs of anger or disappointment, use SentiSum to uncover insights like reason for contact, sentiment, intent, and priority. For example, if a VIP customer is upset about a damaged product upon delivery, you can route them to senior agents with retention offers. 
• Real-time personalization engines: Apps like Nosto help you create customer-centric experiences on your website. Personalize everything from product recommendations to web banners and merchandising based on customer groups and actions.

When you have a constant loop of sentiment analysis, you become a more proactive marketing team. The tools available help you leverage real-time empathy at scale, so you can maximize revenue from EI-driven campaigns.

Measuring the ROI of emotionally intelligent campaigns

Keeping track of ROI is especially important if you’re running EI-driven campaigns. Make sure you have a robust analytics platform set up to track campaign performance and measure loyalty metrics. 

With Shopify Analytics, you can easily understand if your campaigns are working by tracking:

• Repeat customer rate: A higher share of returning shoppers shows that empathy and trust are resonating with first-time buyers.
• Average order value (AOV): Emotionally resonant messaging prompts larger basket sizes. 
• Multichannel attribution: Understand which touchpoints assist conversions. 

You can complement your analytics with various apps from the Shopify App store, too. If you want to understand customer lifetime value, install Lifetimely to calculate CLV across audience segments. 

Want to quantify customer sentiment? Use a survey app like Grapevine to run onsite and net promoter score (NPS) surveys.

Building an EI-driven marketing strategy

Once you have a grasp on EI in marketing, it’s time to build it into your marketing strategy. 

Understand your audience

You’re not going to be able to incorporate EI into your marketing efforts unless you first understand your audience. Understanding shoppers’ feelings and motivations allows you to build relationships and use emotional persuasion to increase sales.

Some tactics for better understanding your audience include: 

• Customer surveys: Email, tweet, or post a link on your social channels asking your customers to respond to a short survey about why or how they purchase products from your brand.
• Social listening: See how your brand fares across the internet and social channels. What do people share, post, or repost about your brand? 
• Buying and traffic data: Review past and present buying and traffic data. For instance, has website traffic slipped while in-store visits increased? Patterns like this can help you understand customer behavior—but keep in mind that data can be misleading if not considered in context. 

Develop empathy

The basic fact is that commerce comes down to transactions. Buyers purchase a product and move on with their day. However, developing empathy for your customers goes a long way in contributing to continued brand loyalty and revenue. 

Talk candidly to your customers. What are some industry challenges? Do your founders or CEOs have personalities that resonate with buyers, and can they speak more directly to them? Skip jargon and speak plainly with your audience. 

Build relationships

The customer relationship isn’t just the transactional one. Getting to the point of making a purchase takes effort, time, and genuine care. Taking the time to talk and interact with your customers regularly is a useful strategy to get them there. Talk to your customers with a casual tone. Don’t lose the brand authority you have, but think about how relationships are built: through empathy, listening, and genuine connection. 

Focusing too much on growth can often cloud a brand’s ability to keep connecting with past buyers. Longevity happens when a brand focuses on nurturing all relationships, not just customer acquisition. Invest time and marketing efforts into connecting personally via emails, surveys, contests, or even responding on social media to your customer base. 

Be authentic

Authenticity is a hard thing to measure, yet it’s becoming an extremely important priority among most buyers. 

Build a brand image that reflects what you truly stand for, rather than chasing cultural or social trends. Are you B-Corp-certified simply because it’s something your competitors are doing? Or does climate change really matter to your brand?

In marketing efforts, develop a consistent brand tone, voice, and narrative to deploy across all channels and campaigns. Always refer back to those brand principles to remain authentic. 

Choosing and maintaining an authentic brand image keeps customers coming back. That said, if mistakes happen, owning them will go a long way with your audience. Trust is important between buyer and brand, so using emotional intelligence by acknowledging mistakes and taking ownership helps repair relationships faster.

Ethical and cultural considerations in emotional marketing

Once you’ve built your strategy, you need to understand the expectations around emotional marketing. 

To start, you’re limited in how you can evoke emotion. In the EU, the AI Act’s first provision, effective since February 2, 2025, bans any AI that “deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques”. 

Across the Atlantic, the US Federal Trade Commission is targeting dark patterns—a term for website design elements that coerce or trick consumers into taking actions they would prefer not to take. The government’s lawsuit accusing Amazon of enrolling shoppers in Prime with a coercive UI started in June 2025. The case states that deceptive enrollment and difficult cancellation flows are now actionable emotional engineering.

And consumers themselves are drawing clear lines. An IAB/Talk Shoppe study of 4,000 people in six countries found nearly 60% call today’s privacy controls “complex and inconvenient,” yet more than 80% still welcome personalization, as long as the value exchange is transparent. 

Culture adds another element. A 2025 cross-border ecommerce review of half a million product comments shows that shoppers in collectivist markets (like Mexico and Brazil) use milder, group-oriented language, while buyers in individualist markets (like the US and UK) express stronger, self-focused emotions.

Overall, ethical practice is also good business. Some principles you can follow for responsible EI campaigns include:

• Transparency over persuasion: State when AI or sentiment analysis is in use and explain the value exchange in the browser's native language.
• Opt-in empathy: Collect only the data customers knowingly share (reviews, feedback, explicit preferences), not inferred or third-party data.
• Contextual localization: Validate that imagery, idioms, and emotional triggers align with local values. For example, what resonates in the US may feel boastful in Japan.
• Continuous oversight: Establish an ethics board or designate a compliance lead to review campaigns against the EU AI Act and FTC guidance every quarter.

Emotional intelligence: Mapping the terrain for commerce

The future of commerce is based on the connection brands and buyers share. Customers who like the companies they buy from are much more likely to continue to return and stay loyal. 

This is why enterprises, regardless of their stage, should prioritize understanding their buyers' feelings, how those feelings influence their behaviors, and how to act on that to optimize the buyer journey. Emotion has a big impact on client loyalty. 

That said, emotional intelligence needs to be part of brand culture, not just for the customer and brand relationship, but throughout the company. Fostering emotional intelligence in employees supports their mental health, which in turn shapes how they show up at work and connect with customers—not just as shoppers, but as people.