There is an art to email marketing. For most people, receiving impersonal emails is a cue for hitting the unsubscribe button. Turning people into engaged, loyal customers requires a different approach, and this is where storytelling can come into play. As former dotcom business exec Seth Godin once said: “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.”
Storytelling in business, sharing relatable stories about the company, the people behind it, and what goes on behind the scenes, can help people to connect with a brand. Done well, email marketing content becomes memorable, and humanises a brand, making it feel like a trusted friend that customers have known for a long time, and whose emails they welcome.
Thanks to the email marketing platform Mailchimp, turning a simple message into a memorable and compelling story that engages the reader has never been easier, as the Yorkshire-based Spanish tapas restaurant group La Casita discovered. From the launch of its special occasion food hampers during lockdown, to raising funds for charity through its tapas cookbook, storytelling is a mainstay of its customer engagement.
La Casita, which launched in 2014 and now has venues in Ilkley, Boston Spa and Skipton, has made clever use of Mailchimp features to tell its stories, bringing its brand and the people behind it to life, and helping create communities in the local areas where the restaurants are based.
La Casita’s content marketer, Georgie Starkey, says: “These are local restaurants and most of our customers are local. Over time you get to know them. We currently have 5,417 subscribers to our emails, and we use Mailchimp to segment them into the three restaurants and share stories that are relevant to the customers of each one. We can also personalise the emails, which makes a huge difference to maintaining those relationships and keeping people engaged and interested in what we are doing on an ongoing basis.”
Subscribers receive a monthly What’s On email with information about what’s happening at their local restaurant, including team news and forthcoming events, and then a second email mid-month focusing on the restaurant’s main offer. “Mailchimp allows us to create engaging content with images and videos that turn our message into a story about our brand that people want to read.”
Sharing behind-the-scenes content enables businesses to connect with customers on a more personal level, and can help make the brand more approachable and relatable. This approach helped La Casita’s email storytelling come into its own during lockdown, when face-to-face engagement between staff and customers came to an abrupt end.
To maintain that engagement, head chef and co-founder Simon Miller, a quarter-finalist in the BBC’s 2012 Masterchef series, took to YouTube to present a series of cooking demos featuring La Casita’s most popular dishes. Via Mailchimp, subscribers were emailed with a link to the YouTube videos and the story behind them; Miller was sharing his culinary expertise so that people could recreate their favourite La Casita dishes at home, and continue to enjoy the La Casita experience even when they couldn’t come to the restaurant.
However, as Starkey explains, they realised that not everyone had access to all the ingredients or some of the kitchen equipment that Miller was using in the demos. This sparked the idea of creating food kits or hampers, starting with a Valentine’s Day hamper and followed by a Mother’s Day hamper, where all the ingredients for the dishes came prepared and ready to be assembled easily.
“In the absence of physical interaction in the restaurants, the use of storytelling in our email campaigns kept people interested, encouraged to try something new, and engaged with our brand,” she says. “This also enabled us to pivot our business and bring in some revenue until we could reopen the restaurants.”
A good story can also encourage customers to form emotional connections with a company’s charitable efforts. During lockdown, there was a real sense among the La Casita team of wanting to help people. On the back of the YouTube cookery demos and the hampers, the next chapter in its story was the launch of a cookbook in 2020 to raise funds for charity.
“It was a small tapas cookbook featuring our top dishes and we raised £3,000 for the charitable food redistributor FareShare,” says Starkey. “We were able to communicate the story behind FareShare and why we were supporting it. Our storytelling tells our customers what we stand for as a brand, and that we are a business committed to doing something good.”
Now, with the cost of living crisis affecting people’s lives, La Casita’s stories are once again focused on its efforts to do something positive to help, this time launching a competition to win dinner for two; a treat to look forward to in difficult times.
Starkey says: “Email is our primary communication channel, and thanks to Mailchimp we have been able to maximise the benefits by creating consistent, compelling stories that people want to read, as opposed to simply firing off emails sporadically whenever we have a special offer. We have a very low unsubscribe rate and I believe that our storytelling approach is testament to that.”
Mailchimp is the number one email marketing and automations brand*. With plans suitable for every size of business and database, marketers are able to send the right message at the right time to convert more customers, get AI-assisted suggestions to make content more engaging, and set up automated workflows to cross-sell products, recover abandoned carts and to help drive more loyalty and sales.
*Based on competitor brands’ publicly available data on worldwide numbers of customers in 2021/2022.
The views, information and opinions expressed in this article are those of the people interviewed and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Intuit, Mailchimp or any of its cornerstone brands or employees. The primary purpose of this article is to educate and inform.
