One thing that sets great email marketing apart from average email marketing is the ability to write simultaneously for different types of readers.
When sending cold email sequences or autoresponders as part of a sales funnel, especially in B2B marketing, you have to account for the fact that some people will read every email and others will only read one or two in the sequence.
You need emails that do not feel repetitive, that reward people for reading all the emails, and these same emails also have to make sense and appeal to someone who reads only a single message in the middle of your carefully crafted sequence.
One of the best places to learn this particular type of storytelling is from classic newspaper comic strips.
I grew up in a time when newspapers were still an important part of the media landscape. As a young kid, my primary interest in newspapers was the Sunday comics section. Each Sunday the newspaper would be thicker and come with all kinds of extra stuff, including an entire multi-page section of full-color comic strips.
I would read every strip, but my favorites were Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts. At some point, I realized that there was a page or two of black-and-white comics the other six days of the week. Not all of the strips were there, but my two favorites were.
That’s the moment I noticed that these comic strips weren’t just isolated gags — they had storylines. A story would start on Sunday and play out throughout the week, or it would start on Monday and reach a glorious conclusion on the following Sunday in full-color splendor. Sometimes story threads were woven in over months.
The brilliant thing was you could read any strip in isolation, and it would make perfect sense. You could join a comic anywhere in its run and not feel confused. A single strip would give you a feel for the characters, the rules of their world, and the stakes of their story. These brilliant artists created stories that made sense as one-offs while giving faithful readers powerful payoffs for their long-term devotion to the strip.
Charles Shultz, the author of Peanuts, wouldn’t just write one strip about Halloween, he would write seven. For days Charlie Brown would agonize over the likelihood of being disappointed by the holiday, Linus would talk up the Great Pumpkin, and the other characters would either mock or console Linus and Charlie Brown. No matter what day you happened upon the strip that week, you would get a funny joke and a sense of excitement from the characters about the coming holiday.
One day the joke might center around Linus being the only person to believe in the Great Pumpkin and other days there would be a gag with Snoopy preparing his costume. If you read each strip that week, the drama would be heightened and by the time you got the strip about Halloween night, you would find every plot point from the week had been paid off. If you only happened to read that single strip, you would enjoy it, laugh, and leave fulfilled, never feeling like you had missed some critical piece of information.
Sequential storytelling — emails & comic strips
The very best email marketing campaigns work the same way. Each email must delight the reader, give a strong sense of the brand, provide something valuable, and invite the reader to take an action that will move them down further into the funnel while also providing continuity with other emails in the sequence and never seeming repetitive.
How do you pull this off? Let’s look at how the comic strips pull it off.
Here is an example from a comic strip from the early 1900s called Little Nemo in Slumberland. Notice how you get a complete story here, even if you’ve never read anything else in this series.
Winsor McCray, the brilliant mind behind this pioneering comic strip, writes as if you have never read this strip before while also writing as if you carefully read each strip.
“Little Nemo in Slumberland” appears as a banner across the top of the strip. One look and you know what you’re reading. The art is also distinctive to this strip. Every comic has a strong visual identity. You know what a Charlie Brown or a Garfield comic looks like.
Brand emails, whether B2B or B2C, should also be visually distinctive. You don’t want to look like the other hundreds of emails that your prospect is going to delete.
Tell them who you are
In the comic above, the characters are always using each other’s names. Even if this is the first time you’ve ever read this strip you know there is a princess and two characters named Flip Flap and Nemo. From the context of the art and conversations you also know there is a king and some mysterious force that wakes up Flip Flap. From this single strip you also learn that all of the events are happening while Nemo is asleep.
You have enough information to know if you want to read more of this strip again or if you will just skip it the next time you come across it.
In every email you have to tell the reader who you are. This doesn’t just mean the name of your brand. Every email should communicate what you stand for and where in the market you are positioned.
Every email should either produce a sense of connection with the prospect or a strong sense that your brand is not for them. You want to polarize the audience so only those most likely to buy continue to engage with your emails and other content.
You announce who you are through visual cues and through the tone of the words you use. You should be direct about who you are. Just like comic characters use each other’s names you should use the signifiers of your ideal customers. If you are targeting small businesses, you need to tell your prospect you serve small businesses.
After reading just one email your reader needs to know the name of your business, how you can help them, and have a sense of what your price point is. Consumers should know if you are a luxury brand or a mid-tier brand. B2B customers should sense if you are offering enterprise-level solutions or if you are offering something simpler and cheaper.
One story thread across multiple messages
You know that your target market needs to see your message multiple times before they buy — even if they love your message. That means sending multiple emails. The problem is you never know which emails a prospect will read, which ones will get caught in a spam filter, and which ones will just come at a bad time.
You want to write emails that reward prospects who read multiple messages. That means they cannot all be the same. They all need to offer something novel, a small case study, a compelling pop-culture example, or a valuable tidbit that will help them in their business or life.
This Little Nemo in Slumberland strip is part of an ongoing story about a carnival. However, this one strip also tells a complete story.
Your emails should do the same thing. Your emails need to be building to the big finale of the sequence, while also containing a complete message in each email.
Every email needs to have a complete narrative and an open loop to get the reader to want the next email. You then need to pay off the open loop in the next email and create a new open loop.
This is the most challenging aspect of email copywriting, and it is what sets apart the great email autoresponders from the average ones.
Storytelling in email marketing requires you to be concise, direct, and able to carry a narrative thread over several emails without ever confusing the reader. This kind of storytelling has much more in common with comic strips than it does screenwriting.
If you want to improve the structure of your email autoresponders, check out a few books of classic comic strips. You’ll not only enjoy a lot of laughs, but you’ll also learn from master storytellers.
Jason McBride is a freelance copywriter, content writer, and editorial illustrator working with B2B companies, professional service businesses, finance, travel, and experience-based brands. A previous version of this post appeared in Better Marketing on Medium.
