The real secret of using stories in your newsletter

👉 without needing to become a brilliant writer

It’s no secret that stories are an incredibly powerful way of getting and keeping attention. That’s why so much advice about writing emails or other content tells you to use them.

Back when I first started writing emails the engagement and interest I got shot off the charts when I began to use stories rather than just splurging facts and figures.

But there was a problem.

One that caused me no end of late nights and pulling out of hair.

Perhaps you’ve run into it yourself?

The problem is that writing stories is hard.

Really hard.

In particular, it’s incredibly hard to maintain a story over a full email or article.

Writing a great story is difficult enough for professional fiction writers whose only goal is to keep you entertained. But if you also want to get across useful information and build credibility and trust through that story it bumps up the difficulty to a whole new level.

But there’s a much easier way.

It’s to use a story as a hook.

An introduction to your content, not the whole piece.

All it needs is a couple of paragraphs of story at the start of your email or article to introduce the topic in an interesting way. Then you can write the rest of your article “normally”.

That way you can use stories for what they’re best at: engaging your readers and getting them interested in the topic.

Then you can get across your tips, ideas and insights in simple plain English, knowing you already have the attention of your readers.

All you need is for the story you use to be relevant to the topic you’re going to give advice on. And that should be pretty easy. After all, the ideas and tips you’re going to impart most likely came from your experience in the first place.

So just spend a couple of minutes brainstorming:

• Have I got personal experience of the particular problem or challenge I’m going to give advice about?

• Have I worked with clients on this?

• Has this come from research? Can I talk about other businesses or people who’ve experienced this?

• Is there an analogy I can tell a story about? Something similar in the field of entertainment or sport or science I can link to?

Any one of those areas will give you a nice little story to use to introduce the topic and then you’re away. I certainly was.

Once I realised I didn’t have to be a story “purist”, writing emails became much simpler and quicker for me. Yet they were as effective as when I’d tried to weave the story through the full email.

And simple and quick means they actually get done rather than getting stuck staring at your screen hoping for inspiration and wishing you were a better writer.

Now if you want, you can get a bit fancy and jump back into your story after you’ve given your advice. Tell your readers what happened after you implemented the tips you’ve just given them.

A bit like I just did there :)

It’s a nice technique. It can give your readers a sense of closure. A bit like a “callback” in comedy.

But it’s not vital. The important bit is to use the story hook to get your readers engaged in the first place.

And that’s much, much easier than trying to maintain it through a whole email.

Lots of benefit. Not a lot of work.

Worth doing.

- Ian