Stories
triumph over sales pitches
What person doesn’t have a story to tell? What business or product or service came into being in a void? Not a one, they all have stories too.
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as too little copy. Stories engage. Otherwise we wouldn’t need news shows, we’d just watch the 5:00 sound-bite version each evening.
But I won’t sit here and try and convince you. I’ll let a real-life “story” do the work for me…
I’ve never met Matt Krause. But he has been a subscriber to my marketing tirades for about 4 years, and we have corresponded on several occasions.
Matt has an interesting business. He lives in Turkey and sells jewelry made by local artisans via his ecommerce site at www.modajewels.com.
Matt does a great job. He is an SEO whiz, and gets a ton of traffic to his site. Still, since he’s always looking for ways to do even more business, I had told Matt I thought a human element would strengthen his site: I suggested he tell the stories of his artisans. But he wasn’t interested.
Then he emailed me for advice on getting publicity on the founding of his company, the love story that started on a flight to Hong Kong and ended with Matt landing in Turkey unemployed but deeply in love.
I suggested he start by putting it on his Web site. He was dubious, but agreed to try it. Here’s what he reported back to me after both posting the story on the site and linking to it in his newsletter:
I put "the story" into this month's Moda Jewels newsletter. In the past, when I've put non-product stuff in there, it's gone over like a lead balloon. I remind myself of the lesson as "Them's peoples, they's really likes them's products" (imagine voice of sunburned southern redneck).
Non-product stuff will typically get around 10% or less of the clickthroughs (often, truly dismal, like 3%). The rest of the clickthroughs go to the product shots.
"The story," though, is pulling 53% of the clickthroughs so far! More importantly, this newsletter is already converting, and the normal selling day has barely begun.
And lest you think people just wanted to learn more about Matt’s personal life, linking to the story impacted Matt’s bottom line too:
After a week, I looked into the numbers some more, and it seems that people who visit that page convert at 10% to 14%, vs. an average of 2% for my visitors overall (and about 2% for retail ecommerce sites in general). A small percentage of the people who visit my site visit that page (about 5% or 6%), so now I am going to work on ways to increase that number, since it's such a rockin' sales tool!
You
can read Matt’s love story at http://www.modajewels.com/thestory.html. And maybe his
story will sway you to buy too.
Until next month,
Sharon
