Teacherpreneur Email and More
Teacherpreneur Email and More
Storytelling: The Right Way and Wrong Way to Tell a Story
Ever wonder why some teacher emails are effortless to read, while others make you want to gag or click unsubscribe? It's not just about telling the right story. It's the magic of storytelling.
We'll be sharing anecdotes, discussing the nuances between personal and teacher-preneur brands, and giving you tried-and-true tips on crafting relatable stories, from quick-witted one-liners to heartwarming classroom tales.
But, we know you're wondering: When should you use personal anecdotes? What's the best time to share student stories? When should classroom stories take the center stage? Hold your horses, we've got you covered!
We delve into the delicate balance of these narratives and give a gentle reminder on the types of stories that will (and won't!) resonate with our audience. Let’s also talk about how to avoid common storytelling pitfalls I've stumbled upon in my personal journey of honing my brand voice.
Oh, and did we mention? We're giving away a free product line sampler when you sign up, coupled with a personal message from us. You wouldn't want to miss that, would you?
You're listening to Teacher Panore, email and more, the only podcast that helps you take the mystery out of what to write for your TPT store, whether you're struggling with what to write your email list or how to phrase your product description so you rake in buckets of cash. We'll be covering the exact steps each week. Let's get started. So I recently hired a copywriter to help me with my brand voice and make sure I had it just absolutely narrowed down and was writing the way that I wanted to sound, and it was amazingly helpful. But one of the things we touched on for about two minutes was something I've been researching and working on for about a year Now. You'll hear lots of copywriters, small-time copywriters and email marketers and TPTers who do email and TPTers in general. I really love to talk about story. You know and there's that book that came out Story Brand and just you know, anybody who does marketing talks about story and how powerful it is, and story is so powerful, but it feels like it's used wrong and when I say this, it could be just used wrong for some brands and not others, and let me explain that. So some brands are very, very personal brands like Jasmine Star is a very personal brand. She puts a lot of things about her personal life on there, and that's so she could use story about her and sell things easier than you and I can. You and I are teacher-preneurs and a few of us have very personal brands, but not a lot of us have very personal brands and so you don't want to put. You want to put enough story about you to be relatable, but you don't want to use it all the time. You want to use story very strategically and I haven't heard anybody talk about this, which is one of the things that frustrate me, because I get emails from lots of teacher-preneurs some that are marketing to other teachers and some that are teacher-preneurs marketing to other teacher-preneurs and I really haven't seen anybody use story correctly, 100% correctly. The way I have seen story and the way we have all been taught is to say you know, I was at the grocery store the other day and I saw all these different options, which got me to thinking there's so many options in TFT I need to really stand out, okay, but that's great if you're a mom blogger, but you and I are not mom bloggers. We're not using grocery shopping. We're trying to relate to teachers and when you want to relate to teachers. You want to talk about the tough, the frustrating, the irritating, the joyful, the wonderful, the light bulb moments. You want to talk about teaching. So you want your stories to mostly be about teaching, and it's okay if you're, you know, talking about some of the things you know.
Speaker 1:Every once in a while you throw in that you know a from home story, but it doesn't need to be mostly about you or your kids or your shopping adventures and that sort of thing. It's fine if you want to start out that way. If you want to start out picking a mundane task and then applying it to the business, okay, fine, start there so you can be consistent. But then move on from it, because it can be that you're having to switch, and anytime your brain is having to switch from one topic to another, you're going to lose some people. So you're switching from grocery shopping, in my example, to your TFT products, and that's a switch and you're going to lose people. So you need to learn just to use story in a more powerful way than that.
Speaker 1:And I know there's so many people but they are not TFTers, and that's one thing that I talked to with this copywriter and they said, yeah, that's garbage. That is not the best way to convert your customers. And I finally and I've been looking for a year for validation on this like, how do we use story as teacherpreneurs? So I'm working on this. I don't have the product complete in my store, but I will talk about a few things that I think we can do better.
Speaker 1:So a lot of times we use analogies and we'll say you know, this is, you know, the way I feel in my business is kind of like while I was watching my kids drowning in the lazy pool, I thought they were drowning in the lazy pool as they were going around, but they were fine and that's how I feel in my business. Or, you know, there's so many options the grocery store. I need to stand out. There's all of those analogies, but a story one thing this copywriter and I, justin Blackman, we're talking about was you know. He pointed out you know, a story can be one line and the funny example he used was like checking a poopy diaper with a finger. You're probably not going to do that all the time and everyone would lean when they read that line. It's going to laugh. But you would want to use that example for mommy bloggers. You wouldn't want to use that example to email geometry teachers, right?
Speaker 1:So you want to try to stay. You want to try to stay with story within the teaching realm. And you know teachers do have kids, teachers do have to go grocery shopping, teachers do have to do all these other things, but you really want to make sure it's a story and you really want to make sure that it's relatable, because a lot of those yes, everyone goes grocery shopping. But if you are writing about teaching, you really stick with teaching and you'll find that in the product that I have, it talks about, you know, using the one, using one lines. Apparently, that's one of my superpowers in my other business is using lines, one lines to tell a story, which I had no idea until we did this call.
Speaker 1:And then you want to figure out when to use personal stories versus student stories or stories from the classroom, those kinds of stories. How do you do that? You know. Then you know when you're looking at personal examples, what is the lesson you're teaching here? So when you use a lot of times when we use analogies, they are.
Speaker 1:The reason we use analogies is to make something complicated simple to understand, so we all feel overwhelmed from time to time, whether it's in our teacherpreneur businesses or as teachers. But we all understand that we don't need an analogy to pull off that explanation. We need, you know, a solution, or we need to understand that the person on the other side of that email understands how we feel. So we tell a story about that, but it doesn't need to be an analogy. So analogies are way overused in the TPT email list that I'm on and I'd like to give us other ideas and other ways to use story and some templates and some email starters to get us kind of out of that bad habit that I think some of these big gurus that well, they teach a lot of mommy bloggers, so they're teaching a lot of mommy blogger strategies, which just doesn't resonate with our customers.
Speaker 1:So I'd like you to try this out. I have used it in my business for a while now more than a year and I would like you to. And I mean my open rates have just increased and increased as I have implemented this in there. So I'm pretty it'll work for you. So give it a try and get away from some of that. Improve, improve, improve, get better. So in the, in the product, I've worked, working on it's not ready yet you'll see where I've kind of explained how story can work, why certain lines work, and then I've included some failed emails that the story was just, it just did terrible and it didn't convert well, and I, after you know sometimes you can't look at it right away and but after I sat on it and I looked at it again and I looked at it with a copywriter and we looked at why it actually alienated part of the audience. So all that's going to be in there.
Speaker 1:Story can be used and story should be used as one of your marketing tools, but needs to be used correctly. And if you're bored of telling teaching stories, well, let's make them better. What is boring you about your stories? Let me know. I can be more specific on strategies. I just kind of wanted to give an intro, since this is something I've been working on. So let me know what you do with story, how it improve, how it converts, how you would like it to convert, and we'll talk about how story. You know we'll do a follow up podcast on this, maybe in six months, after some of you guys have tried this out and let's see where it goes. All right, see you next week. So are we pen pals? Yet I'd love to know that I'm not just trying to educate the closet. So sign up for my free product line sampler so I can send you a personal message and get you the freebie. Talk to you Monday.