Storytelling in email marketing is a powerful way to connect with your audience and create a more engaging experience for them. When you weave a narrative into your email content, it helps you grab your readers’ attention to read the entire content.
Email marketing can take many forms, provided that you can convince your readers to take action in the end. Storytelling is one of the most effective ways to get your audience hooked on your content.
In this article, we will share key strategies for how to effectively use storytelling in email marketing campaigns and see results.
What is Storytelling in Email Marketing?
Storytelling is an art and when combined with the best email marketing strategy, it sets your brand apart from competitors and gets you the best results.
In email marketing, storytelling is the use of a compelling narrative to sell your brand or product to customers. With this, you can use words to create new worlds and experiences in the reader’s imagination. This evokes their emotions and motivates them to take action.
As a marketer, you can include storytelling in your strategy to create a memorable experience for your customers. It can either be real stories about your brand or fabricated stories to pass your message across.
Why is Storytelling Used in Marketing?
The average human attention span has reportedly decreased by almost 25% from 2000 to 2015 and is now 8.25 seconds. This makes it difficult to get anyone’s attention on the internet today when there are already so many things calling for the same attention.
So, how do you bypass the 8.25 seconds and get your audience to stick with your content longer? This is where storytelling comes in.
Storytelling has been shown to boost conversion rates by 30%, as it makes it easier for people to connect with your content. By describing your experience with a product in a form of a story, you let your audience feel the same emotions you felt when you used the product.
This improves your brand credibility and lets your customers trust you even better. 81% of consumers say they need to be able to trust the brand to buy from them, and storytelling gives you an edge.
Benefits of Storytelling in Email Marketing
Here are some key benefits of storytelling in email marketing.
1. Builds Emotional Connection
Stories are a great way to create a sense of empathy between the audience and the characters. This evokes emotions and connects the reader with the brand. When you tell stories, you give your brand a personality that your audience can easily relate to, which helps you build trust and foster a relationship with them.
2. Engages Customers
Stories are great for grabbing your customers’ fleeting attention and keeping them engaged. When you create a narrative that they can follow, you end up keeping them interested and invested in your content. Your audience will likely take the desired action when they feel a connection to your email.
3. Makes Content More Memorable
It’s easier to remember something when it’s told as a story compared to when it’s just pure theory and statistics. If you want to get familiar with your brand and easily remember what it’s about or what you sell when they need your product or service the most, try storytelling.
4. Showcases Your Brand’s Personality
Storytelling gives your brand a personality. As long as you let your stories align with your brand’s mission and vision, you are on your way to making a name for your brand in your industry. Let your brand voice be appealing and something that interests your readers.
Steps to Writing Story-Based Emails That Convert
Good stories are entertaining, memorable, believable, relatable, educational, and organized. How then do you tell your story in a way that reflects these attributes?
1. Feature a Character
Every story needs to have at least one character. Determine who your character will be and if you will be using more than one, gradually introduce them in the campaign.
One of the ways to do this is to use a person’s name rather than the brand name when sending emails. For example “Angela from MailDrip” sounds better than “MailDrip Daily Nuggets”. This already sets the tone of the message, as it encourages more readers to open the email.
Your audience will find your content more relatable when it seems as though they are reading from a person and not a company without a human feel.
2. Create an Emotional Journey
It’s called storytelling marketing because it connects emotions to marketing, with the grand goal to convince readers to take a specific action. As you write, be deliberate about evoking emotions in your readers, be it smiling, laughing, teary-eyed, or joyous.
Build your story around a conflict – this could be a problem that your customers face or a challenge that your business has overcome. Then, set the scene, highlight the stakes, and tie it back to your product or service.
3. Increase the Absorption Potential of the Story
While storytelling is effective, it also depends on how well the story is told. Consider the tone and formatting while writing, to ensure your audience gets the best reading experience.
Key things to consider as you write include humor, irresistible cliffhangers, tension, and providing content on demand or based on trending topics. This is an effective way to keep your readers engrossed in your story.
Bottom Line
Good storytelling in email marketing helps you stand out from the crowd. The average person receives over 100 emails per day and yours can easily get lost in the mix. However, by incorporating storytelling, you can have an email campaign they will always look forward to.
It is also important to note that email marketing is a broad subject and beyond using stories to engage your audience, you must learn the basic things. This includes creating an effective marketing strategy that will guide you on this journey.
To buy you some time, the team at MailDrip came up with an email marketing strategy to help you get started. All you have to do is fill out the form below and it will be in your inbox.
You can also contact us if you need further assistance from any of our experts.
