How do email marketing and storytelling go together? Should you share stories in your emails? If so, when and how? What type of stories should you tell and where does the inspiration come from? Also, when is it not good to tell a story?

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SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:12) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks.

(4:39) Why do we need to tell stories in our emails?

(6:41) More reasons to tell stories in your emails.

(8:31) What if you're in a more serious and 'boring' industry?

(10:33) What makes a good email marketing story?

(12:46) What are some tips to help you get started?

(15:01) Common mistakes people make when telling stories through email (and how to fix them).

(17:06) How often should you use stories in your emails?

(17:33) Learn how to use storytelling in your email marketing inside The League.

(17:57) Subject line of the week.

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Why do we need to tell stories in our emails? 

You probably already know by now that our whole approach to email marketing is story-driven. In other words, we try and weave some storytelling into almost every email we send (with a couple of exceptions). One of the big reasons is that there are only so many things you can say or so many ways you can talk about the product or service you sell. But there are unlimited stories you can relate to your offer and to the problem that your product solves.

Case in point, as Rob was thinking about the idea for a story based on something that happened to him recently, he realised that the lesson he'd pulled out of the story was the same one he'd taught in the email from the day before. And that's okay! Because the lesson may have been the same, but it was framed in a different way because the story was different. Plus, not everyone would have seen Rob's email from the previous day. And even if they had, some people might relate more to one story and not the other.

This means you could potentially have the same lesson every day but frame it with a different story. And that's great if you think about it. Because there are only so many core lessons you can teach or things someone needs to learn before they buy your product. And if you can only talk about a limited set of features and benefits, you'll run out of things to say! So storytelling allows you to continue to talk about your product and what it does in different ways.

More reasons to tell stories in your emails

Another benefit of storytelling is that stories are usually about things that are happening or have happened in your life. So using stories helps you build rapport with your audience - it means they can get to know you. That’s also why we share interesting, silly facts about ourselves at the start of each podcast episode. Because people get to learn more about us, and this helps us become three-dimensional. We’re not just the people who talk about email marketing all the time – we're real people doing things with our families and living our lives outside of work like everyone else. 

The other reason why we love storytelling is that people emote with stories. And this doesn't happen with facts, features, or benefits, for example. On the other hand, with stories, you can make people feel different emotions – afraid, anxious, excited, etc. Plus, physically, stories take up more space in people's heads and brains than pretty much any other medium.

What if you’re in a more serious or ‘boring’ industry?

One thing we can tell you from experience is that storytelling works for everything and everyone. It doesn't matter whether you're in a serious, 'boring', dry industry where you don't think your audience cares about stories. We’ve helped businesses in the government space, insurance, accountancy, and other niches that are quite dry, and we know storytelling works for them too. Because, ultimately, we are humans in a human’s inbox, and these people want to hear from you!

So what if everyone else in your industry is dry and boring? Even better! It means you can stand out by sharing stories and becoming the most engaging email marketer in your industry. That's the experience you can create through storytelling. And it doesn’t mean you have to be wacky and funny in everything (if that's not your brand). But you can at least be interesting.

People like reading stories, and if you’re a 'faceless' brand or a big corporation, you can still pick someone within your team to be the face of your brand. In fact, make a point of sending your emails from yourself or a member of your team because people buy into the person behind the brand. Look at Virgin, for example. Even a huge, massive, multi-vertical brand has a face to it through Richard Branson. And it's one of the best decisions they've ever made. So make things personal. 

What makes a good email marketing story? 

A good story has to either:

• Share something new - for example, teach something people didn’t know.
• Or include something relatable that makes them ask themselves what they'd do in that situation. 

For example, when flying back from hosting a masterclass in Portugal, we were asked to switch off our phones. Why? Apparently, every 30 days, in order to continue to be certified, a plane has to land automatically. And for that, phones need to be completely switched off (not in flight mode). So if we were to put that story in an email, we might be teaching our audience something new.

The other type of content is relatable content, just like the stories that comedians tend to use. And by that, we don't mean you have to be funny - not if you or your brand aren’t funny. Relatable content allows people to agree with you and understand the point you're making.  

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What are some tips to help you get started? 

The first tip we can give you is to be observant in your everyday life. If something happens to you, think about how you can turn that into a story and share a lesson from it. 

We find it's often helpful to think about the first or last time you did something. Or the best or worst experience you had with that thing. Or maybe the scariest or the funniest? You get the gist. 

Just remember that any time something happens to you, you can turn that into a story. So look at the little things that happen to you on a daily basis and start getting into the mindset of getting a story out of them. All the observations you make in the world around you can become prompts for the stories in your emails. And that's all you need.

Common mistakes people make when telling stories through email (and how to fix them)

One of the mistakes we see people make all the time is to waffle on too much at the beginning of the story. Don't do that. You don’t need long introductions or formalities. And also, consider removing bits of the story itself. If you're going to tell a story about something that happened on a plane, don’t start from when you got to the airport (unless that's what the story is about).

A journalistic trick we learnt from our friend Janet Murray is to first write the story, and then chop off the whole beginning. In other words, start from the action and make the story more exciting.

Another mistake is to make assumptions that your audience must know who you are and everything you’ve ever done and that they must have read all your emails. They don't.

Also, don't assume that your audience is familiar with the jargon and technical terms you use in your industry - because they might not. So make everything as simple and basic as you possibly can. Assume this is the first email that person’s ever received from you. That way, you’ll be able to explain stuff better.

And that doesn’t mean you can’t take shortcuts. For example, Rob will often say in his emails that he took Alfie for a walk. He might mention leash training, for example, so even if people don't know, they will assume Alfie is a dog. He implies connection without assuming knowledge. Through the wording you chose, you allow people to have the knowledge without assuming they necessarily know everything about you.  

How often should you use stories in your emails? 

While you want to use stories in most emails, you don’t have to use them in all your emails. We don't use stories in the emails that are 'coming down the wire', such as the last email of a launch when the cart is about to close, for example. And we don't use stories in our 'seed emails', which are the ones we send at the very start of a new email campaign. 

Learn how to use storytelling in your email marketing inside The League

If you want to learn our entire story framework and look at all the email campaigns we teach inside our membership that include stories, come and join us! You get access to our full training on our Bottomless Email Strategy and all our email campaigns. Plus, you learn how to write emails that convert like crazy inside our membership The League.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Cash withdrawal (declined).” This one's interesting because people want to know what happened. Did Rob have no money? It sounds like the sort of juicy, negative subject line that works and sells, just like in the news.

And this email was about the fact that everyone thinks of their email list as this cash machine they can just ‘withdraw cash from’. But actually, most people find that not to be the case. And our email shared how to fix that. So check that out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Comedian’s Secrets to Storytelling – With Kevin Rogers.

The Biggest Mistakes You’re Making With Your Email Marketing Copywriting.

How To Get Your Customers To Buy Using Buyer Psychology In Email Marketing.

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Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

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Unknown 0:40

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy.

Unknown 0:42

Hello. Today I'm even a Marketing Show. We're talking about storytelling and using stories your emails, how to do it, how not to do it, when to do it, when not to do it all that sort of stuff. Once upon

Unknown 0:50

a time, there were two email marketers called Robert Kennedy and they created a free resource called click tricks. It's a really cool resource that helps marketers just like you to sell more of their stuff by getting more people to click on the things in their emails. Robert Kennedy were pleased with the results that they created and they decided to give it away to all of the listeners of the Email Marketing Show completely for free listeners downloaded it and loved it. All they did was went to email marketing heroes.com forward slash tricks, and they downloaded it and lives happily ever after.

Unknown 1:13

Made. I want to use that as an insert every week. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. He's the only person he knows who subscribes to YouTube premium its company habitants Robert sample

Unknown 1:23

and he was chief duck herder its psychological mind reader Kennedy.

Unknown 1:32

You know, no bloody way.

Unknown 1:34

This was this

Unknown 1:37

this was about three weeks ago. We were having lunch out with a park. Mr. Big outdoor, Victorian Museum and and we were having a picnic in the little park nearby. And all these ducks came along and tried to steal our various grub, our nibbles so I shooed them away from the tables, little kids when I was terrified. The jobs I was uploading today

Unknown 2:00

can be quite scary for little cute things.

Unknown 2:04

Absolutely. I'm actually I was sworn as well. He was a pretty intimidating bug. They're not like the little cartoon books that you see in storybooks and I'm DuckTales on DuckTales DuckTales who

Unknown 2:14

never watched I remember the same dream I never was I was raked over the

Unknown 2:17

DuckTales who I thought we used to go in the future was like duck Tails. Tails off

Unknown 2:26

really terrible like the song

Unknown 2:29

was so good. Thunder, Thunder, Thunder Cats all that stuff? Yeah, they don't bother anymore.

Unknown 2:34

They just got mad. Whatever. I didn't I didn't know that you have YouTube premium. Why have you got that?

Unknown 2:40

So I like to randomly like if I'm making my lunch or tidying the house or something my go to now is to like look for something to listen to to learn or be at or be entertained by something on YouTube and quite often that will then result in me either moving around the house or taking Alfea for a walk or doing something that means I have to have I'd have to pause it while I see the option pause it or pay for YouTube premium whereas with YouTube premium you can lock your phone and it keeps playing. I was like I just thought was about getting rid of ads. No, I mean it does get rid of ads. But I was the reason I didn't want to do it because I liked the ads and the person asked scroll through Instagram to see the ads. Yeah, yes. And I know you mentioned it I do miss like seeing I feel very lost in what's going on in the world. But you don't even know what Russell Brunson looks like anymore. I know exactly. Whereas I can lock my phone, put it in my pocket immediately just leave the house and put my air pods in and keep listening to it. So that's why I subscribe to it but the point the price of that particular price.

Unknown 3:24

Everything's going up me I mean the cost of living the cost of having YouTube well have I told you that IE are now when I first joined ie from iPhone, but mobile networks, the mobile, the mobile network to travel abroad with my phone was 10 pounds extra a month and I could use my data and my calls then to put up to 15 quid this summer and then in November it's gonna be 25 pound extra. And that's crazy. Hello, every week on the show we bitch and moan for a bit shot on and then we talk about how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. And we're talking about things like email marketing, strategy, psychology tactics, and share what's working right now to make more sales online, making you the email marketing hero of your business. With a brand new episode every monday wednesday. So make sure you do hit the subscribe button on your podcast player.

Unknown 4:08

So I've already given a you know, an excellent demonstration of storytelling. I mean, it was it was a plug for quick tricks. They're publishing deals are already coming in. In fact thing they can do that as my email inbox for the publishing deals.

Unknown 4:18

That's I mean that's what you won't get Ding ding ding does sound like does it sound like that?

Unknown 4:24

So let's talk about why we need to tell stories on our emails. Our whole approach to email marketing is story driven. So we will try and turn almost every other couple of exceptions. Almost every email that we send, we try and weave something storytelling into it. And one of the big reasons for this is there are only so many things you can say and there are only so many ways you can talk about the thing that you sell. But there are unlimited stories that you can relate to your offer and the product solves. So case in point in the last few days, I've been thinking about, you know what, what emails to send. And I had an idea for a story of something that happened in my life this week. And I thought, Oh, that'd be great. I'll turn that into an email. And I was thinking about as I write the story as a writing and I was thinking what's the lesson I'm going to pull out of this and I paused and I thought, well, that's interesting. It's the precise, exact same lesson that I taught in yesterday's email like almost to the world I could almost have copied yesterday's lesson and put it into today's email and it still would have worked. Now if the only reason why I can get away with doing that. When I say get away with I don't mean in the way that that sounds. The reason I can do that and reiterate that story is still be effective. And it still be effective. Yes, I rewrote it. reiterate it for people who saw it yesterday, and share that story for the first that lesson for the first time with people who didn't see yesterday's email. It is because it was framed slightly differently. And some people will be able to relate to one story but not to another. You might talk about something that happens on an aeroplane and somebody's never flown before kite on for a long time can't relate to that. Whereas if I go and talk about Kennedy duck herding, somebody might think, Oh, I've got a phobia of dogs I hate going to the park when the ducks are about you know, just you know, flying around the park and fast cars and that's not dogs. That's chaps anyway. Somebody that duck phobia, they might relate to that story. And so again, that allows you to theoretically you can have the same lesson and just frame it with a different story every single day and

Unknown 5:49

doing that because it's probably only a few core like lessons that you need to sort of tell people about like there's not many of those either. There's not many of the offer is only got so many features or benefits. And there's only so many lessons that something needs to learn or understand before we can buy a thing, whereas there are unlimited things. I think the other thing that I like about stories is because they usually about stuff that's happening in your life or has happened at some point in your life. You know, Kennedy was at the thing and the dogs and stuff. They build rapport, they get to know you just just exactly like the silly fact that we always have a different silly fact, which is something that's happened in one of both of our lives the very beginning of each of these episodes. Again, people are building rapport because they're learning something more you're becoming more three dimensional. So now you can imagine Oh, Kennedy was in the park with his family. They were kids that they were having a picnic. I'm no longer just this guy who talks to you every email marketing Wedensday on the podcast, but I'm also a person who too much Oh, I'm out there. I'm doing stuff with my family, if that makes sense, right? So really, really important thing. The final thing that I personally love about stories is unlike facts when you're telling people what is included and the features and the benefits which are all facts about your offer your product, your service your thing. People actually emote with stories, you can make them feel stuff, you can make them afraid you can make them feel anxious, you can make them excited, you can make them have this, you can have whatever emotions you want. So by having emotions, you get to hurricane with an emotion at the beginning of your email. So really, really important. And actually if you look at physiologically, stories actually take up physically more space in people's heads than any than pretty much any other medium. So they're really really good for taking other people's brains.

Unknown 7:19

Yeah, that's why I don't read books. I haven't got much space left. A little bit of all this knowledge and humour and honestly I've got just Riddick all over. All over your brain made me funny. The brain is full of Moby Dick. One thing we can tell you from experience is that this works for everything. It doesn't matter whether you're in like a serious, boring, dry industry where you don't think these people care about this. Like we can't talk too much about this but we've like helped businesses who are in like government lobbying we've helped businesses that are in the in the world of you know like insurance accountancy and stuff that you think of as as either so serious they can't do anything with it or quite dry and no offence but boring and therefore they can't

Unknown 7:53

get a dude how many accountants are our clients? I mean loads of accountants.

Unknown 7:56

You've basically got to remember that at the end of the day, you are a human in a humans. Humans inbox even if it's that your first name dot last name at firm I work for.com You are still a human in a human's inbox and those people need to hear from you. If you can be the fun refresh, like imagine going if you've ever been to like a really dry conference and you're expecting it to be full of dry speakers talk about dry topics. And then they bring on a guy in a mankini who like talks wild stories about and is the most engaging speaker of the day and everyone who's gone oh my God wasn't that guy. Amazing. That's the experience you can create. I'm not saying you have to be zany and wacky and funny in everything. But you can at least be interesting. And you can at least be compelling in somebody's inbox. So continue to do this regardless of whether you're selling to an industry you think he's gonna love hearing about, you know, the funny thing that happened on date night last night or not at the end of the day. And if you're like a faceless brand, like an econ business, then pick somebody within your team to be the face of that brand. So send your emails from you or from a member of your team, whoever is going to write those emails. People you know people really do want to buy into the person behind the brand.

Unknown 8:48

I mean, the biggest fans that you look at look at Virgin, I mean, and that's all personified by Richard Branson, you know, like, right, even a huge, massive multi vertical brand like that. Has a face to it.

Unknown 9:01

Yeah, for that. It's one of the I think it's one of the smartest things they've ever done. Was to was to personal brand the hell out of him. Yeah,

Unknown 9:07

absolutely. So what is the speaking of that sort of like making things personal. I wonder what the actual elements are? What makes a good email marketing story and what's a good email marketing story? Do you ever think about this and see what you think, Robert? For me? I think it has to do one or two things. They could do both of these things. I think that's the one or two things. It either has to share something new, something they didn't know. Oh, I didn't know that. When the plane. You know, we want to play recently flying back for a mastermind that we were hosting in Portugal. And we will we had all switch off our mobile phones for landing not on aeroplane mode or switch on like what the hell's going on? When we landed Robert our phone on and search Why the hell happened? And it turns out that every 30 days a plane has to auto land itself in order to stay with the regulations and state with its with its its algorithm right to continue being certified before when they actually do need to land it automatically in like poor visibility and stuff. Now if you tell that story, I didn't do a good job of telling the story that I'm just gonna tell you the fact of what was happening to illustrate the point. But from that, I'm sure lots of us when flooding I didn't know that I didn't know. So that's a story if we're putting this in story format, where the audience learns something new. The other type of story is why they don't learn something new, but they hear something relatable. And relatable is usually the kind of content and I'm very hesitant I use this as metaphor, this, this this way of explaining it because it might give you an idea but let me let you get with it. relatable is the kind of content that comedians tend to use. That does not mean that I was resistant about using it does not mean you have to be funny it does not in fact, don't try to be funny. If you try generally it will work right so but use the relatable stuff is what allows us to to get you understand and agree with that person and then understand the point. So good stories for email marketing, either share something new, that maybe you've discovered, and that you think the audience might discover, or something relatable, something they can relate to something go God Yeah, I do that all the time, or oh, what would I do if I was in that situation? So that's that's the two really important elements.

So let's dig in to some of the ways people can get started with this.

Yes. Okay. So, there's a whole bunch of ways of looking at how to look at all these stories. We've got a whole bunch of different shortcuts, but just in your everyday life, be observant about the stuff that's going on. So if you get a text from your dentist saying about your dentist appointment, think Have I got any stories about the first time I went to the dentist or the last time I went the dentist so I owe the best time so I like to use those e s t and is T kind words they wouldn't even remember what it is. But it's you know, what was the first time I ever did this? What was the last time I ever did this? What was the what was the best? What was the worst? What was the scariest what was the funnest what was the you know what, what was the best of that thing? Anytime something happens? Oh, I just got I came home and my girlfriend got me a lovely card to say welcome home. I've missed you. What was the what was that? Is that the story? Maybe it's an action or if the actual thing that's happening is not as exciting as getting a nice nice card. It could be what was that first one of the first card I have a goal was the last one I ever got what was the most important what was the most precious? What was the most? One of those things? So that's what I thought was really the way to look at all the little things and people you just start getting your head into the mindset. I mean, when we were on our way to Portugal on that flight, there must have been I think there was three things where Rob said right mme was an email there was an email and map as an email and three different things on the way there. Not to mention the stuff that happened when we're in Portugal, or out for meals when we were masterminding on the way back on his journey home from dropping me off at home. Like all these things. There are things happening all the time, whether you leave the house or don't leave the house. And so that's where you're gonna start you're good at what you're doing. You're gonna make your life you're gonna make your observations of the world, your prompt to get these emails started, right, your life the things that you are already doing all the prompts. You don't need. More than that. Really.

Yeah, it's really, really cool. So let's rattle through some common mistakes that people make when they're telling stories through email. First thing is they waffle on at the beginning with sort of Hi, I hope you're well. I'm currently working on a thing trading chat GPT to write daily emails for your so we'll be talking more about that as we go forward. But one of the things it loves to do is to go back to very formal beginnings. You've got to constantly retrain it to remove the high hope you've had a good weekend anyway today. You want to remove all that but you also want to remove the bits about the story. So if we're going to tell a story about something being on a plane, we don't want to start with so we arrived at the airport number about unless the thing happened within minutes of arriving at the airport. So one of the things you can do it's a journalistic trick that our friend Janet Murray shared with us a long time ago is that you can write your story and then you can normally chop the whole beginning of the story and it will still make sense you want to start in the action you want to make it exciting. So that's the first thing people do is they waffle on and they send it on. Second thing that people do a lot is they make assumptions right? You make assumptions that your audience will have on my list, they must know who I am and what I do and what everything I've ever done and what I was born in what they I was born on who my mom is, like all that stuff. They assume that they know you or that they've read a previous email or they know technical terms. So it's really important that you make everything as simple and as basic as you possibly can assume that this is the first email that person has ever received from you. And then that way, you're going to be able to explain stuff better. That doesn't mean you can't take shortcuts, so I'll regularly say in my email. So I took Alfie for a walk. And people generally speaking just immediately know what Alfie must be a dog. I don't say my dog Alfie in every email because you do want to if you want to imply connection without assuming knowledge, so if you can find a way of wording stuff that puts it in a location so talking about it, I took Alfie for a walk and this lead training, you know, leash trainings been a really difficult thing for us. Everyone knows the dog, they can picture where that's taking place, probably in a park somewhere around the block or something like that. And again, it means I don't have to say my dog Alfie, all. The time it allows people to have the knowledge without me assuming that they know everything.

Yeah, and the funny thing is just making them too long, like makes people can read those damn emails. And the thing is, like obviously you don't want to use you want to use stories in most emails, but not every single one. So we're gonna use an almost every email apart from the ones which are like coming down to the wire. So that last email or the launch when the things going to close, or when he quit one, just what we call a seed email, the very beginning of a sequence that we often use with, you know, our svbc formula that where we can just pin our link, but most the time we're using stories because of all the reasons we've talked about if you want to learn our entire story framework, and look at email campaigns that include all of this stuff, and these frameworks, go check out vert League membership.com where you can get access to our full training on the bottomless email strategy, as well as all of our email campaigns and training on writing these kinds of emails that convert like crazy League membership.com. Rob, what is this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week? This one

was cash withdrawal in brackets declined. People want to know what happened did Rob have no money in the account or you know, whatever. It sounds like a sort of juicy negative subject line unfortunately, that you'll see from newspapers negativity works better than positivity. The email was about the fact that everyone thinks of their email list as this cash machine they can just withdraw cash from but actually most people in reality find that not to be the case. Here's how you fix that.

I love it. This week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. Well, thank you so much. Listen to the whole episode of the show. This week. As you know, hopefully we do this every single email marketing Wednesday. So do make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player. And if you haven't already, do leave us a review on Apple podcasts. We would love to read them and we might even read some of them out and also helps us spread the word about the show. We'll see you all next week. Cheers.

Day.