The email that changed everything for me

👉 but I almost didn't press send...

Back when I first started writing emails regularly I got on a roll very quickly and churned out a dozen content-rich guides to various aspects of marketing and selling professional services.

Emails I was really proud of. Some of my best thinking and freshest ideas.

But then I hit a wall.

I’d basically exhausted my pool of ideas. Try as I might I just couldn’t come up with anything decent to write in my next email.

As the deadline loomed I was determined to get something sent anyway.

And I remembered a story I’d been telling a friend about how finally, after years of avoiding it, I’d finally knuckled down and got some back-breaking work done in the garden. (Or actually, my wife Kathy had “nudged” me into doing it - and pitched in herself despite being heavily pregnant at the time).

The hard work really paid off - we’ve been enjoying the fruits of the vegetable patch with raised beds we built for over 20 years now. And I thought there might be a little lesson in there about sometimes needing to just grit your teeth and get some hard work done in your business.

So I wrote the email. Told the story of the vegetable patch along with why it was important to us. Added a call to action to encourage people to tackle their own “vegetable patch”.

And then it came time to press send.

And I froze.

This email wasn’t like any of the ones I’d sent before.

It wasn’t full of new ideas or clever marketing strategies.

“Everyone knows they need to knuckle down and do stuff every now and then,” I thought. “They’re going to think this is way too obvious to be useful”.

But I had nothing else, so eventually, I pressed send.

Back then my emails went out on Saturday mornings, and by the time Jeff Stelling had appeared on Soccer Saturday I’d had double the replies to that email than any of my previous ones.

People told me it really struck a chord. That they were in that exact situation themselves. That it had spurred them to grit their teeth and take on their own challenge.

Clients told me they felt they knew me just that bit better.

I was taken aback.

And initially, I was a bit disappointed.

All the best of my thinking and insights in the previous emails had been appreciated but hadn’t struck home anywhere near as hard as this simple suggestion to grit your teeth and get some hard work done.

But I was missing the point.

It wasn’t the advice.

If I’d just sent an email saying “sometimes you have to grit your teeth and get hard work done” it would have fallen completely flat.

It was the story.

Some of the greatest teachers in history have used parables and fables to get their messages across. Because they work.

They get people interested in what’s going on. Invested in the characters. Empathising with their situation.

And by allowing them to draw their own lessons from the story it means more to them and they’re much more likely to do something about it.

That email changed everything for me.

It showed me there was a lot more to effective emails than just filling them with content. It got me playing around and experimenting with different styles to see what worked best.

It was the start of my email journey that I’m now sharing with you.

And the essence of it was that stories work. Even if you’re an ultra-rational, “cut the fluff” kind of person like me.

Over the years I’ve learned that you don’t need your whole email to be a story. In fact, a short little anecdote to introduce the content can work just as well and sometimes better.

In the next posts I’m going to talk about some of the ways I use stories in emails and newsletters and how to do the same yourself.

But in the meantime, if you download my Email Topic Toolkit it’ll teach you how to come up with an (almost) infinite supply of story ideas to illustrate your emails with. They’ll help you to build connections and write entertainingly. Just click the image to go to the download page.

And to get those next newsletters with the details of how to best use stories in your emails, sign up below (if you haven’t already)…

See you next time

- Ian