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- Email Advice from A Friend - Rob Marsh
👋🏻 Hey! New here?
A tale as old as time
Hey there!
We’re back at it, and today’s Volume is a doozy!
Our advice this week comes from Rob Marsh, a direct response copywriter, host of The Copywriter Club Podcast, and coach to hundreds of copywriters growing their own writing businesses.
He writes a “daily-ish” email to his list, teaching folks how to hone their copywriting skills, and is the esteemed author of Telling Your Brand Story.
Head over and connect to him here, or at The Copywriter Club.
Today, Rob teaches us how to master the art of storytelling in our emails, a critical component to creating engagement (and action) from our readers.
It’s a game of “right foot on the roses, left foot on a landmine”, so you need to do this well in your emails.
Ready to write like the pro we all know you are?
(PS: If you’d like to catch our prior Volumes from expert guests, hit this link.)
Tell More Stories in Your Emails
The average office worker gets 121 emails a day.
Assuming they rush through their inboxes, spending just one minute on each message, it will take them more than two hours to get through it all.
But most will spend more time than that clearing out their inboxes.
That’s a lot.
And that’s a big problem for you if you send emails.
With 120 other messages to get through, people are looking for any reason to delete your message, even if they signed up to your list wanting to hear from you.
Didn’t catch my attention? Deleted.
Boring content? Sent straight to trash
Message doesn’t resonate? You’re outta here.
Standing out from those other messages is your challenge.
So, how do you hook your reader and keep them interested until the end?
Stories.
There’s magic here
Something magical happens when we tell and hear stories. Actually, three magical things happen when we hear stories.
Researchers wanted to understand what happens in our brains when we hear a story.
So they took a group of study participants, hooked them up to an fMRI machine, which allows them to see what’s going on in the brain, then read a list of facts to them.
As expected, the areas in the participant’s brains where language is processed lit up.
The same thing happened when the researchers read stories to a second group of study participants—the brain’s language centre lit up with activity.
But that wasn’t all.
When this second group of participants heard “story” lines like “Jim threw the ball” or “Jill shook her head” the areas in the brain responsible for sensory perception and motor control also lit up, even though the person hearing the story was lying perfectly still in the MRI machine.
Our brains don’t distinguish much between doing a thing and hearing a story about doing a thing. We experience stories as if they are happening to us.
What’s more, a second group of researchers found that when one person tells a story to another, they were “spatially and temporally coupled.” That is, they felt the same things at the same time.
It was a bit like a “mind meld.” If you want to connect and resonate with your reader, there’s no better way than by telling a story.
A third group of researchers at the University of California at Berkley discovered that when we hear character-driven stories, our brains are flooded with oxytocin4, the same hormone released during sexual activity.
Thanks to that oxytocin4, stories help reduce stress, decrease anxiety and make the people we share stories with appear more trustworthy, generous, and compassionate.
I don’t know about you, but that’s how I want my email readers to think about me and my clients.
So what counts as a story?
When you sit down to write your daily or weekly email, you don’t have space to develop a three-act narrative with inciting incidents, conflict, climax and resolution. That’s the stuff for movies and television.
Think anecdotes, analogies, and events.
What happened to you that you can share, with a “lesson” that connects to the idea, product, or service you are writing about?
Your story can be short and simple, like this anecdote about my least favourite holiday…
Hey First Name,
I am not very romantic. The whole expensive dinner, dozen roses, box of chocolates thing just isn’t me.
And fortunately, it’s not really my wife’s thing either.
Years ago, we established a different tradition for Valentine’s Day.
Instead of flowers, chocolates or massive stuffed animals or those other so-called romantic gestures, we give each other books.
And we include our kids—everyone gets a book, gift wrapped in red and white paper, of course.
Then we spend the evening reading.
Just sharing in case you’re looking for a different kind of Valentine’s tradition.
Rob
Easy, right? That’s the story of my Valentine’s Day tradition. The PS mentioned how Valentine’s Day is one of those times we experience the “feels” and linked to a short program about writing emotional copy.
This short story shares something personal about me with my readers. It helps them feel like they know me a little better than if I had written an email that simply mentioned the holiday and promoted my program.
There’s a library of real-life experiences out there
Stories can be short interludes, events from your life, or simply something you believe about the world.
Or you can write longer stories like this one I sent to my list recently:
Hey First Name,
When I was in my teens, I started playing golf.
And like most beginners, I was terrible.
Still am.
I knew I needed practice. But to deliberately practice putts and chips, I needed a bag of balls.
The only problem… balls are expensive—especially on a teenager’s budget. My friend Jim suggested we head to a nearby golf course where the rough is dense (also home to the occasional rattlesnake) and where the wealthy golfers who play there would rather pull out a new ball than go into the bushes to find a lost one.
We should find lots of free lost balls there.
Sadly, we only found a handful or two.
As we tried to figure out what we were doing wrong, we spotted an older man carrying a large backpack overflowing with golf balls, walking down the fairway toward us.
He never went into the rough. How the heck did he have so many balls?
Just then, a large Yellow Labrador Retriever came running out of the rough, dropped a golf ball at his feet, then headed back into the bushes to find more.
Looking back, the lesson is obvious.
You can make progress on your own... stumble around in the bushes and maybe find a handful of golf balls (while keeping an eye out for snakes).
Or you can get help from someone who knows how to do the thing you’re trying to figure out.
If you’ve been in the rough looking for clients and wondering how “successful” copywriters are finding them, this is your Yellow Labrador Retriever.
Rob
That link (which I’ve removed) went to the program we offer at The Copywriter Club that helps copywriters and other freelancers find high-paying clients.
At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, I know I need to share more stories, but I don’t have any stories like those.”
My answer? Of course you do
You’re just not in the habit of seeing them.
I write an almost daily email for my list (in addition to emails for my clients), so I’m in the habit of seeing “stories” everywhere.
I’ve written emails about my morning run, missing typos in an email, an old Memorex ad, and reading Spider-Man comics when I was a kid.
And I’ve shared other stories I’ve found “in the wild” about the Dire Straits, a 9-year-old kid who stole his mother’s car and drove it to McDonald’s, and the worst singer of all time.
Then I tied the story to whatever I was promoting that day.
Still don’t have a story to share?
What’s the least boring thing that happened to you yesterday? Share that.
Or share a client success story. What successes have you helped someone achieve?
Or share your origin story. Why do you do what you do?
Your readers joined your list to hear these kinds of stories. They want to know what you do for Valentine’s Day and the lessons you’ve learned from your life experiences.
Matthew Dicks, author of Stories Sell, advises everyone to write down three memories or experiences from your life every night before you go to bed.
These can be things that happened during the day, or things you remember from your past, or just the ideas that occur to you.
Follow Matthew’s advice, and within a month, you’ll have almost 100 story ideas. Do it for a year and you’ll never run out of stories to share.
Does every email need a story? Probably not.
Meeting reminders, announcements, and other business emails might not need a story. But if you add a story to those emails too, readers will pay closer attention.
When our inboxes are crammed full of memos, offers, and boring messages that receivers can’t wait to delete, your story-filled emails will stand out, get read and get a response.
And isn’t that why we send emails in the first place?
-Rob
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