Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses

How to Write Stories in Your Emails to Boost Sales

• Gary Redmond • Season 2 • Episode 6

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Unlock the hidden potential of your email marketing strategy with the art of storytelling. We delve into the transformative impact that engaging narratives can have on your sales emails.


Listeners will discover how to shift beliefs through powerful storytelling techniques, making their offers resonate on a deep emotional level. By reframing email communication, you’ll learn how to move beyond traditional sales pitches and create a compelling connection with your audience.

Throughout the episode, insights are shared on why many sales emails fall flat. People often resist direct requests to buy, entrenched in their beliefs about their challenges.

However, when you craft a narrative that empathetically addresses these beliefs, you can foster a powerful sense of connection and understanding. The conversation provides practical frameworks that empower you to tell your own stories effectively and creatively within your emails, ultimately guiding your audience to your solutions organically.

Listeners will walk away not only with a deeper appreciation for the art of storytelling but with actionable steps to incorporate narratives into their email marketing strategies. It’s an engaging and insightful listen for anyone looking to enhance their connection with potential clients and increase their sales without coming off as too aggressive.

Join us and discover how you can transform your email marketing approach by leveraging the timeless art of storytelling. Don’t forget to subscribe and share your thoughts on our social media channels!

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and I'm also a mentor and coach helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. Okay, so in today's episode, I want to talk about the power of storytelling in email. Okay, the power of storytelling in email. Okay, and how you can use the power of stories to sell without being salesy or pushy. Okay, because most entrepreneurs, coaches, founders struggle with email sales because they feel like they're being pushy or salesy. Okay, and that's because, a lot of the time, when you invite people to join your email list, you're giving them an exchange of value, like in the form of a lead magnet or a PDF or whatever it is, and they're joining your email list. You know you're giving them an exchange of value, like in the form of a lead magnet or a PDF or whatever it is, and they're joining your email list and you feel that. You know you should nurture them. Of course, email is a nurturing channel and you should send them content and send them newsletters and things like that. But when you know someone like me comes along and tells you you know, you should be using email for sales, it's a difficult sort of hurdle to sort of switch and try and just decide that I'm going to start selling to my email list, and oftentimes what a lot of people have tried and or what a lot of people have done is they've tried to do that and they send, like you know, a you know a stinking sales email. Like you know, it's clearly, clearly a pitch and people don't respond to it. Okay, because they're not used to it. You're not used to doing it and the energy on both sides is just not right there, okay, so the solution here is to actually get better at storytelling, okay, and I'm going to give you a framework in this episode that's going to help you to basically continue to deliver value, to continue to deliver your insights, but frame them in a way through stories, and then, at the end of the story, you can offer them the next natural step, which we're going to present as your offer, okay, or we're going to, we're going to present your, we're going to, at the end of the story, we're going to give them your offer, which we will present as the next natural step. Hope that makes sense. So by the end of this, you'll know how to shift your audience's beliefs using stories, so they naturally see your offer as the obvious thing to do next, okay, so first of all, I want to talk about why sales emails don't convert.

Speaker 1:

Okay, because usually people don't just buy because you tell them to. Okay, they buy because of their beliefs shift. Now, I'm talking mostly here about sort of I'm not really talking too much about e-commerce, okay, I'm talking more about selling to a person. If you're a coach or consultant or an expert, a lot of the times you're going to have to shift people's beliefs before they, you know, believe you enough in order to actually buy your services. Okay, the other reason why most sales emails don't convert is, like you're probably focusing too much on logic and not on insights or perspective.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so if you just, you know, if someone believes that they lack leads, okay, for example, as one example, okay, like I don't have enough leads, okay, and you just say you just tell them, you know, oh, you know, you just you know you do have enough leads. You know you just need to get better at outreach, or something like that. Okay, like that will just bounce off because that doesn't question their belief. Okay, that just tells them that, you know. You know that just basically dismisses the problem that's in their head. So a lot of people's beliefs are pretty, are pretty tightly held, okay, and I'm an example of that as well, and all coaches are. They have, you know, certain beliefs that you know in their mind make a lot of sense for them and that they're the cause of their problems. But in reality they're probably easily fixed or they're probably, you know, not as big as an issue as they build up in their head.

Speaker 1:

Okay, but a lot of people do that and they sort of overblow one part of their business because, like, for example, in the leads to issue, like you know, oftentimes you know you might have, I might talk to someone who has like 5,000 followers and 2,000 people on their email list, but they tell me they haven't gotten enough leads. Okay, when reality, like, clearly you have people who are listening to your message and you have an audience there. So in a way, all those people are leads. But what you need to do is you need to convert those people into engaged leads by, you know, sending out engaging content, getting them to reply to your emails, your social media posts, and generating conversations. Okay, if you're not good at that and you don't even understand that that's something you need to be doing, then you're going to blame your leads, okay. You're going to blame your lack of leads, okay.

Speaker 1:

So just to give you an idea um, the fastest way to shift a belief, um is it's your well-told story, okay. Um, because people, each every story you tell has usually has a moral, has an, it has a lesson, has an insight, it has something. Um, and, like we're humans, we're wired to pay attention to stories. Okay, like, ever since, you know, millions of years ago, when we used to sit around campfires and there was nothing else to do at the end of the day is is to tell stories from today's hunt or whatever's gone on in that day, humans and primates had to develop language. I'm going very, very deep here, but basically, telling stories is as old as time. It's as old as language. So people listen to stories and they get engaged. So how storytelling changes beliefs and they get engaged, okay. So how storytelling changes beliefs and lead to sales, okay.

Speaker 1:

So, as I mentioned there previously, like I briefly touched on, you know, people trust personal experiences more than instructions, okay. So I mentioned before about you know, okay, you have enough leads. Okay, you know, if I just tell you that and you have enough leads, you just need better conversations Like you're going to have some resistance, okay, you're going to argue with me. You know you're going to say you know're going to argue with me. You know you're going to say you know, no, I don't have enough leads. You know, the problem is not, it's not internal, it's external. Another thing that humans are very good at doing is, you know, externalizing the problem and not saying that. You know, it's harder to admit that I'm just probably not doing the right work or enough of the right work than to admit that, than to say, you know, it's just external, I'm good enough and I just don't have enough leads, okay. So that's another thing. People do a lot, but of course people don't just oh, you know, now I'm doing the wrong thing. Thanks for pointing that out. Now I'm going to start doing the right thing and be a millionaire. You know, it's not really the way people sort of, you know, change their behavior. They'll take particularly as a self-criticism and it'll probably just paralyze them. Okay. So stories, though, bypass this resistance and bypass this argument and give you a vehicle for you to change their perspective, okay.

Speaker 1:

So, for example, instead of me saying you're just doing the wrong thing, okay, I say for years I taught my coaching business how to lead problem. Okay, I was running ads. I was, you know, getting people on my email list, growing my audience and sending these emails and wondering why my revenue was stuck and I couldn't, you know, grow my business whatsoever. Then I noticed something weird. Whenever, whenever someone followed me or someone joined my email list and I asked them or I got them to somehow whether they they DM'd me or replied to my email or whether I somehow, for some reason, reached out to them and I started to get into conversations with them, I noticed I would close about 10 times more sales If I had a lot of conversations in that week or in that month. I started to notice that I would get a lot more sales. That's when I realized my problem actually wasn't the number of leads that was coming in. It was the fact that I was waiting for people to come to me instead of having conversations.

Speaker 1:

When I realized this, every day when I logged onto my computer, I would try and strike up conversations with my new followers, my new email subscribers or whatever, and through the process of doing that, these conversations naturally led me to figure out that they had a problem that I could help them with. And when I started to do that more often, that's when my income, you know, became a lot more stable and although I didn't have any more leads coming in or even any more leads that were following me, the ones that were in conversations with me were a lot more engaged. And my followers. I realized all of my followers and all of my email list, even if it was only 100 people and you're just getting started. That is a massive resource you can use to get sales and clients, if you just know how to get into conversations with people.

Speaker 1:

So then, if you say that story, automatically the audience rethinks whether they have a lead problem. They start to see their 500 followers and 200 email subscribers differently rather than me just telling them. So it's the same story, it's the same sort of diagnosis and um treatment. You're just not basically getting enough conversation to be, but you could just be doing better. It's framed in a.

Speaker 1:

I realized this through my business and if this makes sense to you, then they if it makes sense to your, to your readers of your emails they rethink things and it changes their perspective and they start to see their own business and their own problem differently. And that is a very, very powerful part, a very, very powerful thing you can do, and a very, very powerful part of storytelling is now, I seem, because of what you just told me in that story, I now see my business differently, okay, and now I see my problem differently, and the big, big problem before, which was leads, is now a smaller problem and I'm going to talk about at the end, um, about position. Actually, I'll talk about it right now, okay. So when you do this and you shift someone's perspective, automatically, this creates a new perspective and it also creates a gap. So previously their problem was leads, okay, but now I've just basically told you a story that explains to you that it's possibly not your leads, it's you're not using the correct system to convert and to get into conversations with people who are already following you or already on your email list. Now that opens a gap, okay. So what I've just told you is you know that's, that's what you should be doing. And now, when it went. When I now, when I say that to you immediately, if you believe that and if you resonate with that story, the gap is well, how do I do that? Okay, and that's where you can then transition at the end of your email, after telling your story and showing how that was changing your perspective, got you much more clients, much more money, much more results. Then you say, by the way, if you want to get help with this conversion system, with this conversation system, with doing what I did to fix the problem that you now have or the problem that I've just revealed that you have, well then I'm running a training or I coach people on this. So reply to this email or or comment on this post or this story or whatever, and I'll get in touch with you. Okay, and that also opens a conversation and that's how you convert people, okay. So, or could we click this link? I'm running a workshop on how to do this. Click this link here and you know we're, you know we're going to show you this next week. Okay, so that very easily get someone to take an action which involves giving you money, without ever having to even you know harshly tell them what they're doing wrong or have any resistance.

Speaker 1:

You're simply telling stories and which shifts their beliefs, so like if you're. The question you might have now is like what stories do I tell? Well, this is. It goes back to understanding who your potential customers and your clients are and thinking about what are the problems that they're experiencing. Of course, you can use chat, gpt nowadays. You know what is the possible problems and you know desires of someone who's in X niche. That's helpful. But also knowing your customers. But another thing is you know oftentimes you are your customer, your customer is you two years ago or five years ago. So what was your problems back then? And that should give you an idea of how you can frame your stories and how did you overcome the problems that they're probably experiencing or are experiencing right now, and that should give you plenty of ammunition for your stories.

Speaker 1:

So, in terms of actually using this in an email, it's relatively simple. Okay, I mean it's. It's just the one thing you want to do is you want to try and start with a start with a hook? Okay, start with something that's going to grab their attention and some sort of subject line that's going to induce curiosity. But at the back, at the beginning of the email, you pretty much just dive straight into your story a personal moment, an experience or something that happened to you unexpectedly, and then, at the as the story is told, the insight is revealed. So, as I told you the story about the leads, there, the insight that was revealed was you know you probably have plenty of leads, you're just not. Maybe you know you're waiting for people to come to you instead of reaching out. That was the insight, okay. And then you know the offer. Okay, so hook them into your story, tell the story and then, at the end of it, make them an offer, such as if you're struggling with this. If this resonated with you, here's how I can help. Click here reply book in whatever it is.

Speaker 1:

So, in using these in your own emails, some things, just some tips here is you know, lower the pressure. You don't need to have a big story, okay, you don't need to have, you know, a rags to riches I did this, I did that. Small stories often work better than big ones. You know small wins and small shifts, you know, are often more powerful for someone than say, oh, you know, I redesigned my entire life in a year, okay. Tie stories to their struggles, okay, so, or their desires. So if you know that people want to have more free time or they're struggling with you know with sales, or with lead generation or with you know anything, and you know, make sure you're tying it to their struggles, okay, and don't make yourself the hero either.

Speaker 1:

You can definitely tell yourself the story, tell you, tell the story about yourself, but if you can try and frame it in a way that you know this is just something that you overcame and you know you still struggle with these things sometimes, but, um, you know it's, it was a shift that really helped you. You know you don't have to be like. Oftentimes, you know there's a lot of sort of you know I did this and therefore I'm a big authority and you should listen to me. You know, sometimes the ego is, it works against you most of the time in this kind of situation. Um, so, yeah, I mean, look, I would definitely invite you to test this out, this three-step framework. So hook them, tell a story and, at the end, transition to your offer.

Speaker 1:

And the other thing I wanted to talk about is you know, even if you wanted to do this as a quick exercise, okay is to and think about a story or a belief that holds the hell you back or you believe your audience has that's holding them back and think of a story or an experience from your own life that help you to shift that belief, and then use the three-step framework to turn it into an email. Okay, that's what. That's your, that's your homework for this episode, okay, um, so, yeah, um, in terms of the story just to go over this one more time um, in terms of like sort of a bit of a framework for telling the actual story, you want to try and talk about your own personal experience or a shift in your own thinking or a situation that was the way it was at a certain point in the past, and then you know a shift. Generally, a story should have a you know an arc, a shift, something changed or something different, and then when, when that changes. That gives you the insight.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so you know your original belief was wrong about having not having enough leads. What actually, what changed was? I realized I wasn't using the leads that were in front of me. I didn't see them. Okay, and then the, the natural offer, as I said, is like you know, if this sounds familiar, I help people, you know, master conversations and conversions inside my program. Let's talk, click this link, whatever. Okay so, and that's kind of you know a little bit deeper on the actual structure of the story.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so that's it for this week. Okay, remember, storytelling isn't about sharing random experiences. Okay, it's about guiding your audience to new perspectives so they naturally see your solution as the answer. Okay, and so identify. If your challenge for this week is to identify an experience or identify a story or a problem or a false belief your audience has, and write a story-based email that helps them see the truth or see your new perspective, okay, so if do that and if you need any help with that, you can send it to me at gary, at garyredmondnet, and I'll be happy to take a look at it for you. And, yeah, please share this podcast. Share, like, subscribe, wherever you're listening. And, yes, thank you so much for your attention and I'll see you next week.

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Gary Redmond

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