Most companies are taking advantage of email marketing. While some create funnel strategies to guide customers through the sales cycle, others, simply send sales promotions and flash sale offers hoping for a quick sell. While all of the above are good email marketing tactics, storytelling should be at the core of every email you send. Although there are many ways to incorporate storytelling into email marketing, here are the key ingredients which will bring you closer to achieving success.
Know Your Punch Line
We all know how important the first impression is to the success of our relationships. Think of the subject line as the first impression you are making on the recipients. Your audience will decide whether to open or ignore your email by reading the subject line. The key to a good subject line is to be concise, personal and clear about what recipients will get from opening the email. The key to making a good first impression is to never make false promises just to get people to open your email. The tactic of confusion will back fire in the long run and ruin the bond of trust between your company and the recipient.
Know Your Audience
Before crafting an email, it’s important to know what kind of stories appeal to your audience. Take the time to craft several customer personas to better understand what kind of stories will help you build trust and increase conversion rates. Typically, personas address multiple factors, but the most widely used are audience demographics, psychographics and motivations. While it’s important to know who your audience is, it’s as important to know what motivates them to make certain decisions. For example, “Millennials are 44% more likely to permanently disengage with brands if they receive high volumes of mass generic email communications (1).” This shows just how important it is to invest time and resources into knowing your audience and their soft spots.
Make Them Care
Although good subject lines will compel your audience to open your email, it’s critical to provide relevant and engaging content once they do. Only produce content your recipients will appreciate and trust enough to continue along the sales funnel with you. Your story must resonate personally to create that special bond between your brand and the recipient. Statistically, people who are emotionally attached to brands, are more likely to invest their own resources to defend the brand and help promote it on social media (2).
The way Andrew Stanton put it in his Tedtalk (3) “Storytelling is joke telling. It’s knowing your punch line, your ending, knowing that everything you are saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal. And ideally, confirming some truth that deepens our understanding of who we are as human beings”. Now that you know the key ingredients of good storytelling, use them wisely…