49. Storytelling in your sales emails

In this episode, Samantha breaks down story selling, a way to write sales and launch emails that persuade through story instead of argument. She explains why FAQ-style emails ("a lot of you have been asking about X, so here's the answer") tend to fall flat, and shows how swapping that format for a client story does more work in less space. Samantha walks through three sales psychology principles behind why stories convert, then applies all three to a specific example from her own copywriting work with a book coaching client.

Key points covered in episode:

• The three psychological reasons a story sells better than a claim (and why your reader's brain fights back against direct pitches)
• How to combine an FAQ, a testimonial, and a transformation into a single email instead of three separate ones
• A simple framework for turning any objection into a story: problem, solution, transformation
• Why splitting FAQ emails and social proof emails into separate sends is costing you opens and conversions
• How to identify which past client's story matches your current audience best

Resources Mentioned:

• Forgotten Launch Emails checklist: https://nomadcopyagency.thrivecart.com/launch-emails-checklist (use code PODCAST for $1)
• Copy On Demand membership waitlist: https://www.nomadcopyagency.com/copy-on-demand 

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Transcript

0:00

Hey friends, and welcome back to Copy And. I'm Sam, your founder and lead copywriter of Nomad Copy Agency, and today we are going to talk about story selling. Sounds like storytelling, actually story selling. And I'm gonna start with a question, because when was the last time that you received a list of FAQs, read through them, and thought, "Yep, I'm gonna buy that thing"? The answer is probably not like, "Oh, yeah, I did this exactly recently." However, FAQs very much hold a place on sales pages, and I don't think that they should go anywhere. What I do think should change, however, is in our sales sequences and in our sales emails, the way in which we talk about FAQs should change. So let me give you some context. When I first started copywriting, I downloaded like every other copywriter's templates to see how they were doing it and to see how they were teaching it. I was also been in coaching programs and seen other people's coaching programs on how they teach launch emails. And in the past, what was really common was a launch series that had dedicated emails for social proof, dedicated emails to each FAQ. And I don't think that's wrong, but I think the way in which we do it is wrong in that most of those emails would say something like, "A lot of you have been asking me about blank, so here's the answer." And instead, what we need to do is leverage storytelling to show people, not tell them the answer to those questions so that they can see how your offer or your program might apply to them. Sound good? Then let's dive in. The first thing I wanna talk to you about today is sales psychology. I'm gonna run through these three terms, and then we're gonna see how they play out in an example that I give later on. So the first term is narrative transportation. This has been around for probably twenty-five, thirty years it's been named, but it's when someone gets so absorbed in a story that they stop evaluating and counter-arguing when they're hearing it. Recently I read the book Yesteryear, and without giving any, spoilers away, I was talking to a friend about it afterwards, and I was like, "It's crazy because the main character is so hateable, yet we're kind of rooting for her because we're so used to rooting for the main character in stories that we hear." So this narrative transportation is like the story was so good that we stopped kind of hating this person for who she was. Again, no spoilers. So, ultimately, this narrative transportation means that there is-- when we make a claim, when we say, "I'm the bestest out there," that it is natural for people to feel scrutiny and to want to counter-argue that. And so a story helps to bypass that scrutiny. Second thing is the self-referencing effect. This is when a reader pictures themselves inside someone else's story. Also a really good use case for empathy. So it feels like a mental rehearsal that takes people out of their objection and into their potential. Again, you hear me talk a lot about problem versus potential. That's what the self-referencing effect is. It helps people go from, "I don't think I can do this alone," to I think I can do this with your help. And obviously with your help means that they're putting themselves on the other side of the paywall. And then social proof. I talk about social proof a lot. A lot of times it is synonymous, synonymized with testimonials. But also storytelling helps us get social proof. Basically saying that a real person just like the reader, somebody who has the same objections, and pain points, and fears, gets permission to see themselves on the other side of their problem. So let's then talk about story selling and how this looks in your sales emails. Story selling, I don't even know if this is a real thing. I just think it sounded like storytelling and was clever, so I decided to start talking about it. But it's the practice of taking an objection that your audience has, and instead of arguing them out of it, you show them the way to the other side And again, we've probably all heard that we should be storytelling more, add more of a story. And I've talked before about how every story has a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is where they are now. The middle is when they make the decision to work with you. The end is the transformation, what's on the other side of working with you. But when we're specifically looking at some of these FAQ emails where you need to accomplish multiple things, you need to show them that you know them by identifying their problems. You also need to help guide them to the other side. That's story selling. So if you're writing sales emails or launch emails, I want you to kind of just, you can do this with a pen and paper or just theoretically draw this conclusion, but think about what is an objection that somebody has to working with you? What is the deliverable that you offer that helps them overcome that objection or helps them get past the current problem that they have? And then once you can tie those two things together, the problem and the solution, the solution being your offer, how do you then tell them what happens after that is your transformation? So, so think about that in your offer. And I'm gonna go through an example of a client of mine that I've had recently to really put some color to this. So let's say, for example, that you're a coach So let's use, my coach client, for example. Her name is, we'll call her Kelly. Part of her program offered one-on-one calls as part of the offer, and something that she solves or a problem that she solves and an objection that she hears all the time was either, "I don't think I can do this on my own," or, "I can do this on my own," but they have failed. So that's a problem that people keep seeing, is that what she offers, which she's a book coach, so people thought that they could write their books on their own, or people thought that they had no idea how to do it, but didn't know where to get help. So either way, the solution that she offered to both of those problems was she offered one-on-one calls and one-on-one support in their book writing process to help them get past the hump of just not knowing how to get their book out of their head and into their hands. So problem and solution, we've nailed that down. However, for her to send a sales email that says, "I keep getting this question. People have no idea how getting my help when I'm not an expert in their area, how could I possibly help them write their book? Here's how I help them." Rather than doing it like that, she can frame her email as a story. So instead, let's say that her client's name was Judy She would write an email that says, "Hey, I wanna introduce you to Judy because like you, Judy had so many ideas. She really wanted to get this book out of her head and into her hands, but she had no idea how." Because when she would sit down to write, and then she would tell an exact story of what it looked like for Judy and what she knows it looks like for all of her other clients, what exactly that looked like for Judy. So she would tell a story about how she would write down a million ideas on a Saturday, and then Sunday not have any time to write them, or that she would have all of these ideas but didn't know how to piece them together in a book that felt persuasive for her potential clients, because let's say that Judy was a professional development author. So she would then say that this is everything that Judy did However, Judy took the leap and started doing one-on-one calls with me, and this is where she started to see results. Judy ended up outlining her entire book in month one with me, and by the end of month three, not only was the book pretty much finished and ready to go to editing, she also had put the manuscript in the hands of five different publishers And then you say, "This is what every client inside of my book coaching program gets." And this is where Kelly can then wrap up the email and say, "This is what every client in my book coaching program gets because I also want you to get in front of publishers. I want you to not just have an idea for a book, but one that exists in the real world. I want you to have a legacy project that helps you bring on more clients, get speaking gigs on more stages," et cetera, et cetera, right? So we are then using 95% of that email to tell a story about the transformation that somebody like Judy, someone like the reader could get, and we spend about two sentences talking about the deliverables That is what story selling is. And so again, let's kind of take a look at this story that we just told as far as a sales psychology standpoint, as we've done narrative transportation. Somebody saw somebody else's transformation, and they were able to put themselves in those shoes. Same thing with the self-referencing effect. And also from a social proof standpoint, we're then implying that this isn't Kelly's first rodeo. Kelly has helped Judith. She has helped countless others in her programs achieve results just like this. She could even conclude the email by saying, "This is a really common result in this program. In fact, ninety-five percent of my students have completed their book within the first sixty days of the program so that they can start looking at things like publishing," and I, I'm trying to even think off the top of my head, all the other things that happen once your book is published. So there is a social proof aspect to this too. So rather than having a dedicated email for social proof that says, "Judy really loved working with me, so did Joe and John and Jane," she has now baked in social proof into an email that was also about FAQ. So she is bringing in all of these psychological principles into one email. So why is this important? Why do we not wanna separate out an FAQ email and a social proof email? Well, there's a lot of reasons, but I wanna be really practical about this, that most of us have about a forty percent open rate, which means of every hundred people who you send an email to, only forty open it, and even lesser than that are going to actually read the whole thing. So if they're opening about forty percent of emails, that means that if you only have one social proof email or one FAQ-based email, sixty percent of your audience isn't gonna see it. So when we do this, we story tell. We are using sales psychology. We are also making sure that the most possible people see all aspects of your offer So here's how I want you to do this in your own sales emails. First, sit down and think about the objection and the solution that you have, or the problem and the solution that you have for them. Then think about the people that you've worked with in the past and whose story you can tell that is most like the audience that you are targeting. So for example, if Kelly is a book-writing coach for professional development authors, she's not gonna wanna talk about the romance authors that she's worked with in the past. She's gonna wanna use specific examples of people who are in the professional development space So then you've got the problem, the solution, and the story behind it. You pull all of that together, and you conclude by making sure that you say, "This is what you are capable of too, reader," and this is where your call to action comes in. So we've just told a complete story that has led to a sale without it ever feeling salesy, without putting people's hackles up and having them say, "Oh my gosh, I'm being sold to. I'm going to scrutinize. I'm going to question. I'm going to take these as claims rather than commitments." We ease our way into the sale, and we become very human while doing it So if you're one of my copy on demand members, you've heard me say these things a million times. This is the kind of feedback that I bring you when we're working together on your stuff. And if you are not yet a copy on demand client, I will put the link to the wait list in the show notes. If this is something that you'd like me to do for you, you can reach out to me at nomadcopyagency.com/contact. That's where you tell me about what you're trying to sell, and we can get on a call and talk about exactly how we can do it And if you just want a little bit more of me and to stay in my world, I will put every launch email that you need to convert in your next launch in the show notes. You can get that full list of 40-plus emails for just a dollar when you use the code PODCAST. I will see you next week on Copy&.