Every great speaker has these - you should too

👉 here's how you can build them

Watch any professional speaker at the top of their game and you’ll notice they all have something in common:

They all tell stories to get their points across. And those stories are unique to them.

They’re called signature stories inside the speaking business. And they’re the very core of how speakers make sure they stand out, get remembered and make an impact.

And I’m going to suggest you need them for your emails too.

A signature story is an engaging way of getting across a key learning point - while building your credibility.

If you’ve heard me talk about how valuable email marketing is then you’ll have heard me use a story of how I avoided it for years until my friend Lee told me point-blank I was an idiot - forcing me to rethink my ideas and get started.

If you’ve heard me talk about the power of stories in emails you’ll have heard me talk about my very first story-based email “So, are we going to do this?”. How I was petrified people would think it wasn’t valuable enough, but when I pressed send it got the best response I’d ever had.

A signature story is like a parable or fable. It lets you get across a key message in an interesting way where your audience “gets it” for themselves rather than having the whole thing spelled out for them. So they believe it and remember it more.

And because the story is unique to you it ties you irrevocably to that idea in your audience’s minds.

Signature stories are often the origin stories of your best ideas and recommendations. I tell you to write a newsletter because after my friend Lee hassled me into writing one I got brilliant results. I advise using stories because once I started using them myself (because I ran out of “proper” content) I got much better engagement.

Sometimes the stories are obvious. Sometimes you have to think a bit.

One of the things that has made the biggest difference to me in recent years has been using templates to simplify my email and get better results from them.

And that came from being short of time because Kathy’s business took off in the pandemic and I needed to give it a couple of days a week.

It was only when I found myself so short of time in my own business that I realised that my purist approach of building everything from scratch just wasn’t tenable for busy people in the real world. Better to get 80% with templates rather than 100% in 5x the time building from scratch.

I’ve never really told that story before. This email is the first time I’ve properly articulated it - because I forced myself to sit down and think “how come you’re so keen on templates these days when you never used to be?”

But it’s a powerful way of introducing my email templates. It shows how valuable they are, and that I understand the issues many of my audience face because I’ve faced them too.

Your signature stories will be the same. A couple may spring immediately to mind. But often the best ones will need you to noodle through why you think the way you think.

That noodling is worth it.

Because whether you tell them on stage or in an email, signature stories can move minds.