Email Marketing - Your Emails Must Tell a Story

Making your income from marketing online means spending a lot of time testing and measuring, refining and retesting and then starting the process over again.  The other day I was doing this with my email marketing campaigns, and I was struck by something...

I had run an email campaign promoting a product that was really quite good but had never sold all that well.  It had really frustrated me, and in spite of myself I kept tweaking my efforts to try and get it to sell.  Well, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my email marketing campaign for this product had finally yielded a pretty respectable return!

"At last!" I said to myself, "people are finally seeing what a great product this is!" And being the careful marketer that I am, I set out to immediately find out what I had done that made the difference...

The email I had sent had a very similar type of motivator to get the email opened that I had used successfully in the past, but had not made a difference marketing this particular product before, so I crossed that off...The length and link insertion was identical to my most successful email marketing campaigns...And the story my email told was relevant to the problem the product so ably solved...

Wait a minute!

I went back and reread each of the previous emails that I had sent out promoting this product.  Not one of them told a story.  I then went and pulled the articles and blog posts that I had used and again found that not once had I promoted this product by telling a story about my own experiences...

This really had me wondering now.  What about my other email marketing campaigns?

I immediately thought of a half dozen successful email campaigns and went to take a look at those.  Of the six, four of them did nothing but tell a story of my own, and one contained a second hand account of someone else's story!

To be perfectly honest here this shouldn't have been a surprise to me at all.  I had long since seen that telling a relevant story in my blog posts was the most effective way to convey a message and got the most comments.  My articles that told a story had the highest click through rate. And here I was struck by the fact that by the numbers, my email campaigns that told a story were even more striking in their effectiveness over any other type of email campaign I have used.

In spite of the many naysayers regarding the many forms of email marketing, it remains a major source of business for many internet marketers including myself.  Email blasters, safe lists, ezine advertising and of course mailing to my own lists still make up a significant portion of my sales both for my own products as well as for affiliate products.

Including stories in the form of testimonials is often quite successful as well, but for the most impact and the highest conversion rates nothing beats a first hand account relating first your own experiences and frustrations followed by a successful triumph over them without too much embellishment.  If it sounds too good to be true your story can come off as nothing but another sales letter and dismissed out of hand.

There is no shortage of copywriting courses out there, and I have read a good deal on the subject.  While I am no world class wordsmith, my work is sufficient to the task and so will yours be if you use this technique with honesty and frequency.

No less of an authority then Gary Halbert, author of the most successful sales letter of all time points to storytelling as the single best form of copywriting bar none.

Going forward, as I sit down to write each email marketing campaign I will begin by asking myself one question: "What story should this tell?"

Jim Patterson

I get the best results from Web 2.0 Based Email Blasters [http://mtgac.com/mymacronettools.html]

Read more about Email Marketing and Internet Marketing in general at my Internet Marketing Tools Blog.