Storytelling is trendy, and you know it.
Everyone talks about differentiation and how necessary it is to stand out in a world of lookalikes where everyone seems to offer the same solutions.
One resource that often comes up as a way to differentiate yourself and stand out is precisely the star of today’s post: storytelling or, put simply, the art of telling stories.
That’s our starting point, but don’t worry, we don’t want this to be just another post on the subject.
We’re going to dig a little more precisely into what it is (because the stories marketing needs aren’t the same as the ones a 7-year-old needs), how to use it in your mailing strategy and, finally, we’ll roll up our sleeves and see how to put it into practice.
Shall we?
What storytelling really is
“Telling stories” is accurate, but very vague.
“Telling stories so that the reader empathizes with us and ends up converting” is more specific and just as fitting for the marketing world we live in.
Storytelling applied to email marketing is a way to get the reader (your potential customer) to empathize with someone (the protagonist of the story) so that they:
– See themselves in the story
– Keep you top of mind
– Reply to your email
– Click on a link
– …
All these steps serve the ultimate goal: the sale. The conversion.
You do storytelling so that, sooner or later, your reader buys what you sell. The end.
How to integrate it into your emailing strategy
OK, storytelling has caught your eye.
Next step: how do you start making the most of it in your email marketing strategy?
Here’s a textbook ABC (and we mean ABC literally).
#A Tell me who you are and I’ll tell you what to write about
The first thing is to look inward and see whether your company will do well with storytelling in its newsletters.
If you run a funeral home, it doesn’t make much sense to tell everyday stories, mainly because you probably don’t have a database. You’d be one of those companies nobody wants to hear from, for obvious reasons.
If you sell legal advisory services, you’d have plenty to work with, because you have endless client stories (always respecting confidentiality, of course).
If you’re a personal brand, you have a whole lifetime of experiences to share.
In the end, the point is for the reader to see the human side of your brand; so even if you’re not a personal brand but a “serious” company, storytelling by email will remove that barrier of impersonality that keeps the conversion from finally happening.
Needless to say, what your company is like on the inside will also determine who your buyer persona is, another element to keep in mind when doing storytelling: who are you going to tell the stories to?
#B Think about what goals to pursue
Once you’re clear on the material you have and who you’re going to tell it to, you need to think about what goals to pursue.
Actually, you can work out the goals first; it doesn’t really matter.
Do you want the reader to click the link in one of your emails and buy a €900 product from your ecommerce store?
Do you want them to click and book a diagnostic session with you?
To reply to your email?
To ask you for a quote?
To stay top of mind so you can close the deal another day?
There are countless goals; think about what you want to achieve by “bothering” your subscribers, because if you just shoot in the dark and see what you catch… that’s bad news.
#C Time to plan
Right, now all that’s left is to plan. You have this:
– Stories and the rest of your inventory of anecdotes
– The receiving buyer persona, who we want to convert
– The types of conversions you’re after
Now you have to take all that, throw it in a blender and come out with a storytelling strategy for your newsletter that’s more or less sustainable over time.
When are you going to send emails? Daily? Weekly? Once a month?
Will they be emails with calls to action? If so, will they be text links or buttons?
Will they all be stories with a sales pitch at the end, just stories, very sales-oriented, or a mix?
Just as people create editorial calendars for their blog or social media, set one up for your newsletter and go for it.
Tips for email storytelling
Let’s keep going with a few tips and pointers to keep in mind when it’s time to put it into practice.
The email subject line is the front door
When you send a bulk email to a hefty list of subscribers, a new line will appear in their inbox with your company name and a subject line.
A short one.
This is where you have to be precise, because you have to beat ten or twelve other competitors (or more, depending on how often your subscriber clears out their unread emails) and you barely have any room to do it.
Creativity, starting points, data, hints that what comes next is interesting… The goal there isn’t to sell products, but to get the reader to open the email.
That’s its only mission.
How would you “sell” a story in just a few words?
This is where creativity plays an important role, because it can save you a lot of time. Otherwise, you’ll have to put in the work to come up with headlines like:
– The day the company lost €2,500 without us noticing
– My current partner turned me down 4 times before saying yes
– When a happy ending has a disastrous beginning
– …
Don’t you want to read the email behind those headlines? Come on, you’re even hoping the second one is real, so you can see what the author of the email did to win over their partner after several failed attempts 😉
Set the scene at the start of the email: every story begins with a where, when or who
Start your story by putting the reader in the picture, so they know the starting point.
Where, when, who… anything goes to get started and make the reader want to keep reading:
– It was a day in January 2017, when…
– 2017, Madrid. I didn’t have a penny to my name…
– My friend Marta really comes out with some things…
– The other day I was at the dentist’s office when…
– On Tuesday, a man dressed in pink walked into the office…
A good opening that makes people want to keep reading gives you every chance that the recipient will read the rest.
Explain the situation, ideally an everyday one: it has to be believable
The story, fairly short because this is an email and it can’t go on forever or it won’t get read on a phone, must be (or seem) real.
If you spin tall tales, it’ll be obvious a mile away that it’s a lie, and you’ll lose credibility. Zero empathy in that case, and empathy is exactly what you’re after before reaching the conversion.
If on a Tuesday you talk about your trip to the Bahamas and on Friday you send an email saying you know Messi… well, that comes across as a bit odd.
Unusual.
Hard to believe, even if it’s true.
Draw on everyday situations that happen to everyone, because it’s much easier for people to identify with them:
– That day the boss fell asleep during a team meeting
– That company dinner where Marcos from sales disappeared for 2 hours and nobody ever found out
– When you arrived at the office with wet shoes and made a mess of the whole place
Something has to happen that brings about a change in the protagonist
At some point in the story you tell, something has to happen that connects in some way with the goal of the email, if that goal is a direct conversion.
That “something” is what brings the email to life, the reason the recipient reads it and, at the same time, what will lead them to convert one way or another.
If you only want to build your brand, you can tell that something and leave out the call to action at the end.
If your goal is for the reader to take some action (click a link or button, reply, forward the email…), that “something” will be the trigger that sets it off.
Let’s say you want to send an email where you use storytelling to tell the story of the time a homeless man on the street taught you how to appeal parking tickets with a simple little trick: you pay €4 at the machine, print the ticket, roll it up tight and slip it into a suspicious mailbox in the most unorthodox way imaginable.
You can tell the story in full detail and have the call to action at the end be something like this:
“If you get one yourself and aren’t lucky enough to run into someone on the spot who helps you appeal it, the smart thing would be to have a legal team so you don’t have to worry about these things”, with a link pointing to the sign-up page for the service your company provides.
Finding that connection isn’t easy the first few times, but practice makes perfect.
Can paying your rent late be connected to selling sneakers? → Run faster than I did when paying my rent last February.
Can your phone breaking down tie in well with getting a quote request for a tailor-made suit? → We can’t do anything about your phone, but we can make you a suit with anti-drop pockets, so it doesn’t happen again with the new smartphone you buy.
As we said: practice, and don’t be too strict with the connections.
Long live the postscript
When we don’t feel like reading, we tend to glance at the postscripts, where we expect to find relevant, fun or summarized information.
Take advantage of it.
When you use storytelling in your emails, use postscripts to clarify something, wrap up a loose end from the body, announce what’s coming next or repeat the call to action.
Anything goes, since it’s the least formal part of the whole email:
– P.S.: I put my phone in rice and there was no way to dry it out. Goodbye, iPhone.
– P.S.: in the end, the boss woke up and acted as if nothing had happened, as if none of us had noticed.
– P.S.: my landlord told me off, but that was the end of it because in March I paid on time.
You can even include several postscripts in the same email:
– P.S.1: in the end the tax office left us alone, but it took blood, sweat and tears.
P.S.2: and we also hired an additional advisor to avoid any more nasty surprises in the future.
P.S.3: if you want us to help you, remember: it’s right here.
Inspiration comes from your day-to-day life away from the computer
So where do the ideas come from? How do you keep up storytelling week after week without running out of material?
The premise is still not to make anything up, mind you.
To come up with ideas, some types of storytelling you can jot down are things you’ve seen or that have happened to you in your daily life, such as:
– News you’ve read
– Something a friend told you
– Something that happened at the office
– A sporting event
– A TV show
– Going to the gym
– …
Every everyday situation gives you something. The final recommendation is to spend exactly 2 minutes at the end of each day writing down those events or simple ideas that could later turn into a story for your emails.
Your debit card’s contactless failing is enough for an email; if it doesn’t work at the supermarket that day, add the incident to the list, and another day talk about what happened and add that your website maintenance service neeeeever fails.
Storytelling and email marketing: time to get started
Now you have the basics to get started: you need a strategy, to think about who you are and who your buyer persona is, what you’re going to talk about, and what should never be missing from any email you send.
In other words, the theory is done; all that’s left is to put it into practice.
Start collecting ideas. Get yourself a small paper notepad or create a note on your phone where you can add everyday events that are more or less noteworthy.
And start writing, fearlessly. Let it flow; little by little, they’ll come out better. What matters is that it’s clear there’s a real person behind those stories.
After a while, as if by magic, you’ll catch yourself saying “that’s enough for an email”, which means storytelling has become part of your daily routine 🙃
Jose Argudo
CMO at Mailrelay. Writes about email marketing, copywriting, and conversion for small businesses and entrepreneurs.