Copywriting
Why the storytelling most marketers use in emails backfires
Short answerThe storytelling most marketers are taught for email marketing backfires: the cinematic opening scene, the long wind-up, the dramatic origin story, the vivid details that never happened. It reads as fake, buries the point, and delays the one thing the email is for. What works is a dispatch. Something real that happened, told plainly in a few lines, then the lesson, then one action.
Everyone has been told that stories sell. So a lot of marketing emails now open like the first page of a thriller. Late night, glowing screen, a dashboard full of red numbers, a knot in someone’s stomach.
I’ve had drafts written for my own emails that opened almost exactly like that, down to an oddly specific time of night that nobody actually remembered. Those lines got cut. Not because stories don’t work, but because that kind of story doesn’t.
So let me be precise. I’m not against storytelling in email marketing. My own emails are mostly stories. I’m against the version that gets taught, because it’s built for novels and movies and it falls apart in an inbox.
Why the movie-style story backfires
The first problem is that it reads as fake. Your reader has been getting marketing emails for years. They can spot a staged opening in a line and a half, and once they’ve spotted it, everything after it gets read as technique.
That’s especially true when the details are invented to make it feel vivid. My standing rule is that vague-but-true beats specific-but-fake. As I’ve said on calls, “I don’t make things up and I don’t stretch truth,” and “when you start adding those inauthentic things in, it crushes everything.” People can feel it when something isn’t true, even if they couldn’t tell you why.
The second problem is that it buries the point. An email should have one goal and one clear action, a click or a reply. Every paragraph of scene-setting is a paragraph where that goal hasn’t shown up yet, and a lot of readers are gone before it does.
The third problem is the shape. The taught version usually builds to one big dramatic breakthrough. But most real expertise, mine included, isn’t one lightning-bolt moment. It’s years of accumulated data and a lot of small lessons. Forcing that into an epiphany story makes it less believable, not more.
What works instead: the dispatch
My own emails usually open like a dispatch from my actual week. Plain, a little mundane, straight into what happened.
“Hey crew, hope you had a relaxing Memorial Day weekend.” “One question I get asked a lot is…” “Hey it’s Andrew here – and thanks for attending our workshop!” None of those is trying to be cinematic. They’re just true, and they sound like a person.
Here’s how short the story can be. In an email about why I don’t use ad tracking tools, I spent most of it explaining how Meta sequences ads and why turning off the “losers” can make a campaign crumble. The story was two lines near the end: “I spoke with a client about this yesterday, and he made a great point. ‘So it’s more like a flywheel.’ That’s exactly right.”
That’s it for the story. It did one job, which was to show a real person arriving at the same conclusion I was arguing for. It didn’t need a setting or a time of day.
If you want a rough shape for storytelling in email marketing, it’s story, then lesson, then one action. The story is what happened. The lesson is why it matters to the reader. The action is the click or the reply. Keep the story as short as it can be while still being true.
The story has to carry the proof
The stories that do work share one thing: the story is the evidence, not the decoration.
I’ve seen this in my own numbers on Facebook, which is where I can measure it most easily. Posts that were just a proof screenshot got almost no comments (about 0.3 on average). A long first-person story with a real result buried inside the argument got 79. Same kind of proof, but in the story it arrived as evidence for a point, instead of being the whole post.
That’s the test for storytelling in email marketing. If you delete the story, does the email lose its proof? If yes, the story is earning its place. If the email makes the exact same case without it, the story was decoration, and decoration is the first thing a skimming reader skips.
It also helps to pick the moment that’s a little uncomfortable to tell. The mistake you made, the thing that didn’t work at first. I wrote about why the email that feels awkward to send is usually the one that sells, and it applies double to stories.
Where scenes actually belong
I’m not anti-scene. I just put them somewhere else.
My rule is that ads open in a scene and emails open like a dispatch. In an ad, you’re talking to a stranger, and dropping them into a moment from their own life (“that’s me”) is how you get them to stop scrolling. Notice that’s their moment, not yours.
In an email, the person already knows you. They opened it because of your name and a subject line that earned the open. They don’t need to be ambushed with a scene. They need you to get to it.
When the story-led email is the right call
There’s an honest exception, and it depends on the market.
Some markets are what I’d call non-procedural: relationships, health, identity stuff, anything emotionally heavy. Those readers need to feel understood before they’ll consider a method, so leading with the emotional story makes sense there. The same goes for markets that are low in sophistication but high in emotion, where a story-led sequence is often the right pattern.
Even then, the rules of storytelling in email marketing don’t change. The story has to be real, and it has to get to the point. A procedural market (business, money, anything technical) mostly wants the process and the proof, and emotion laid on thick tends to feel manipulative to them.
What to do this week
Take the next marketing email you’re about to send and delete everything above the first sentence that states what actually happened. Then check every detail in the story against what really happened, and cut anything you added to make it vivid. If the story is still more than five or six lines, trim it until the lesson and the one action show up faster.
Should marketing emails tell stories?
Yes, if the story is real, short, and carries the point. A plain account of something that actually happened, followed by the lesson and one clear action, works well. Long cinematic openings and invented details tend to read as technique, bury the point, and cost you readers before the call to action.
How long should a story in a sales email be?
As short as it can be while staying true. Some of my emails carry the story in two lines. A useful test: if deleting the story wouldn’t weaken the email’s proof, it’s decoration and can go. If the story is the evidence for your point, keep it, but trim the setup.
What’s a good way to start a marketing email?
Start with what actually happened, plainly. A question a reader asked, a test you ran, something a customer said. Avoid dramatic scene-setting openers, which readers now recognize as a template. Save scenes for ads, where you’re dropping a stranger into a moment from their own life.
P.S. A quick gut check before you send: read your opening line out loud and ask whether you’d ever say it to a friend across a table. Nobody starts a real conversation with a time stamp and a glowing screen.
