Does Your Email Tell a Story? April 19, 2018, | Posted by Erin

Free Quote

Call Now

Newsletter Sign Up

Sign Up

Company Cookbook

View Now

While much of email marketing strategy focuses on factors like subject lines, targeting, and positioning the message, an often-overlooked aspect of overall strategy for email is within the realm of content. At Site Impact, we know that email is much greater than the sum of its parts, and a successful campaign hinges not just on getting the message to the right person, but getting that person to engage with the message. On that note, it’s important to ask the question: does your email tell a story?

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean on the literal level, but an overall brand story that gets told through email marketing efforts is an important layer of any and all campaigns. One of the ways that savvy email marketers accomplish an ongoing narrative in their messages is through newsletters, geared towards consumer engagement and interest. Not all of the emails that go out should be sales-oriented; while that may seem like it’s a strange thing for an email marketing agency to say, it’s true. Emails that tell the story of a brand, emails that provide consumers with information on the development of products and services, or key talent within customer-facing positions, enhance not only recognition of the brand itself but also engagement.

Even within the more transactional email types, incorporating the idea of a storytelling perspective can bring with it a great deal of benefit. Adding elements of telling a story to your sales and promotional emails can deepen the interest that consumers will have, increasing conversions. It creates an added layer of mystique and development to the products and services that you’re selling, which only enhances the odds that someone receiving your message will go through to convert. 

How to incorporate this concept into your marketing efforts is a more complicated question, of course; how do you tell a story in an ad? The most basic approach to solving that problem is to create ads themselves that tell stories, even the most basic story of a consumer looking to solve a particular problem, and using a particular product to do it. Advertorial content for magazines, newspapers and other publications has long been invested in telling a story, even if the narrative is fairly loose. Look at what kinds of stories your brand can tell through its marketing efforts: the development of a product, narratives from satisfied users, and so on. 

Multiple brands have already discovered that by taking a storytelling approach to email marketing, they’re seeing increased engagement, higher click-through rates, and even more opens. Part of the process is to understand that conversions are more than just people buying a product; sometimes a conversion is someone going to the site to get more information, or someone sharing a video with their acquaintances, or posting to social media about a promotion.  Of course, if you’re used to being fairly direct in your email marketing, making a shift to a more narrative approach like this can seem daunting. Contact Site Impact and let us tell you how we can help you come up with brand stories that will drive your email recipients to greater trust and recognition.