Photo by rupixen.com on Unsplash

We stopped advertising our products immediately cities started their lockdowns this year.

It was a very tough time for my company; all our businesses were affected, from eCommerce to our agencies (especially for dentists and schools).

Fast-forward to when the lockdown was eased, I decided to sell our old stock off very quickly so I could order a new set, but I wasn’t ready to start buying ads. The only thing I could turn to was our list of email subscribers.

Usually, whenever we want to get a lot of sales within a short period of time, we usually did email promos. I mean discounts, flash sales, and any other thing that involves reducing the price of our product. And these were usually tied to holidays and unofficial observances.

Some creativity needed…

This time around, there was no Black Friday or Easter holiday to declare a promo for. And really, even though I knew (or rather, heard) that people reduced how they were spending money, I wasn’t interested in giving discounts.

So how would I sell off the products we’d had since March without a discount – less than 40 pieces?!

I decided to test something I’d learnt a few months earlier. But it was kind of tricky…because instead of info products that the strategy was originally made for, I wanted to use it to sell physical products – a $40 soap (and bonus moisturizer).

It basically involves selling with stories – or what you can call Storyselling.

Email Storyselling

I sent 5 emails, one per day. Wasn’t sure what I’d call it, so I announced it as a “5-Day Workshop”.

Day 1, I introduced my spokesperson (the face of the brand) and told her story in a way that I was sure my audience would relate to. Even while open rate was just about 6%, we had 13 orders before the second email.

Day 2, I told the story of one of our customers, in a way aimed to break any objection they might be having against our product. Unfortunately, Day 2 bombed because of some rookie mistakes I made; I used a weak subject line (our lowest open rate throughout the campaign) and I forgot to make clickable (hyperlink) the link to where they’ll order the product. So, we got ZERO clicks from that email! (But this email taught me a lesson that made other emails successful.)

Day 3, I told the story of another customer that had success, despite an internal challenge that could’ve been my dream customer’s objection to the sale. It went very well, and we had orders flooding in. This gave us    the second highest open rate and the highest clickthrough rate of the campaign.

Day 4, I told yet another story of a customer hat had success despite the external challenges she faced, which some of my dream customers would be facing too. This went very well too.

Day 5, finally, I gave an “irresistible offer”, with a lot of value stacked up for my dream customer. It was the grand finale of the campaign. And we got our highest open rate for the campaign here.

Result?

We got over 70 orders that week alone. And in the coming days, as more people opened our emails, more orders kept coming in. And after two weeks we’d had over 100 orders.

We lost some of them, because we went out of stock before the end of the email campaign, and unfulfilled orders had to wait for over two weeks before their orders got shipped to them, and then another 3 to 5 days for their soaps to reach their doorsteps.

Wish we prepared for the orders we got, but I never expected it; was only looking for a way to sell off the less than 40 soaps we had since before the lockdown. Reason I didn’t give any discounts.

Record breaking…

It ended up being our best email campaign ever, despite not doing any promo or giving any discounts, and despite the fact that our email deliverability had gone bad (email client issues!)

Secondly, we noticed that most of the orders were placed by new buyers; people that’d spent months and years on our list without buying from us.

These point to the fact that the story-selling strategy that gave us this unexpectedly good results is a powerful one. I had used it earlier to test-launch a digital product in April via live webinar and it did well, but I was surprised to see it do that well via email for a physical beauty product.

Since then, I’ve used it for another webinar, VSL (video sales letter) and even traditional sales letter, and the results have also been good …for me and my clients.

Found its way into SSS…

I’ve also incorporated it into The Septuplar Sales System, and even though not every business or funnel would use it, I still make my clients write out their stories using the story selling strategy I described earlier.

Whatever you do, ensure you incorporate stories in your sales scripts or copy – not just any story, but stories that break false beliefs and counter the major objections against your business, before they even arise.

Of course, if you need my help in creating, for your business, stories that sell, you can reach out to me via email at me@oludami.com, and we’ll see if you’re a good fit for my coaching program.

Story selling is just a teeny-tiny bit of all I’ll help you do to ensure that your business consistently gets a lot of sales profitably, so that you can grow and attain that freedom every entrepreneur deserves – financially, spiritually, time-wise, etc.

Talk later,

Oludami

Facebook Comments