Why Storytelling Attracts Clients
I wildly under-estimated the power of telling stories in my blogs and email marketing to connect with people! While it was uncomfortable at first, I now know that stories totally build relatability and ultimately new clients. Here’s why storytelling attracts clients
As a kid, I hated English and writing classes. I could never think of a topic for Creative Writing papers and all I remember about English class was years of diagramming sentence structures. To date, I can still diagram any sentence (subject/predicate/object) – probably in my sleep. Now that I’m older, I still don’t understand the practical value in diagramming.
When I first started email marketing and posts, I was very matter of fact in my writing style. I wanted to give people as much knowledge, value, and step by step actions as possible. While that was helpful, I now realize the information was very dry and the delivery was sorely missing any emotion.
I found out about the impact of storytelling by accident. I was following an auto-responder template from my friend, Andrew McCauley, one of the top 100 social influencers recognized by Forbes and Founder of Autopilot Your Business (http://www.autopilotyourbusiness.com/). He explains what to write in each email one by one.
Mid-stream in writing the email sequence, I was required to share a personal story. Yikes! That was way out of my comfort zone knowing it would go to everyone who opted in for my freebie. I’m fairly guarded in what I share with people (but working on being more open and vulnerable). I choose to write about how my Dad unexpectedly died when I was 16 years old and we almost lost our house to foreclosure without his income.
The feedback when people read that email blew me away! I had tons of emails from people telling me how that story made them cry, they never knew I grew up like that, and more. I had no idea sharing a personal story would produce that type of connection.
More recently, I sent an email to my list with a story about my volunteer day in Costa Rica last week. In summary, I was doing a fairly complicated puzzle with a 9 year old boy who only spoke Spanish at a community center. After 10 minutes I realized it was obviously too hard for me, so I told him it was difficult in my best possible Spanish. He smiled, put that puzzle away and retrieved one with 36 pieces (each super-sized piece was the size of my hand) so we could still play together. My takeaway lesson was how it’s important to pay attention to others and accommodate them when they are struggling.
There were more details to the story, but the response was nuts! I heard from people I haven’t spoken to in years. They loved hearing the story and my lessons learned. I didn’t think the story was extraordinary, but it triggered something in people.
So …. I’m thinking there is something to this storytelling technique. I haven’t quite pinpointed exactly what’s working yet. Not sure if it’s the content, the lessons, the writing style, or simply telling just a story. Whatever it is, it definitely brings connection and new clients. I encourage you to try it on next time you post or send an email to your list.
The funny part is that even though I disliked writing and English, I am now a bestselling author who just signed a contract with my publisher for a second book. Crazy! I’d send a copy to each of my English teachers if I could remember their names.
The Amazon pre-orders were just shipped, so again I’m hearing from people I lost touch with about how they loved the stories in the book. If you want an autographed copy, you can ORDER IT HERE.
I’d love to hear how storytelling is working for you. Please drop me an email at [email protected]
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