Imagine someone handed you tickets to the hottest show on Broadway.
There’s just one catch.
You only get to watch the last two minutes.
You find your seat. The curtain rises.
The main character dies.
Everyone around you is crying.
People are holding their breath. Some are wiping away tears.
Meanwhile, you’re sitting there thinking…
“Wait…who was that?”
You didn’t laugh with the characters.
You didn’t watch them struggle.
You didn’t see the relationships develop.
You missed everything that made that ending matter.
Without the journey, the ending has no emotional weight.
Now think about your marketing.
For a lot of businesses, the only time customers hear from them is when they’re asking for something.
Buy this.
Register for that.
Don’t miss today’s sale.
It’s the marketing equivalent of showing someone the last two minutes of the play.
Then we wonder why people aren’t excited.
People don’t buy because they know the ending.
They buy because they’ve been part of the story.
That’s what great marketing does.
It doesn’t simply promote products.
It builds familiarity.
It creates trust.
It teaches.
It entertains.
It helps.
Little by little, those moments add up. By the time you finally make an offer, it doesn’t feel like it came out of nowhere. It feels like the natural next step.
That’s one of the biggest advantages small businesses have.
You don’t need a million-dollar advertising budget to build relationships.
You just need to show up consistently with something worth sharing.
Over the years, I’ve started thinking about this as The Journey Factor.
It’s a simple idea:
The Journey Factor
The more invested people become in the journey, the more likely they are to take the next step.
Every helpful email.
Every useful tip.
Every story.
Every answered question.
They’re all part of the journey.
And the stronger that journey becomes, the easier it is for someone to take the next step with you.
Try this
Open the last five marketing emails you’ve sent.
Now ask yourself one question:
If someone read only these five emails, what would they learn about my business besides the fact that I want them to buy something?
If the answer is “not much,” you’ve uncovered a huge opportunity.
Your next email doesn’t have to sell anything.
Instead, try one of these:
Answer a question customers ask all the time.
Share a lesson you learned the hard way.
Tell the story behind one of your products or services.
Highlight a customer success story.
Show people how to get more value from something they’ve already purchased.
Every one of those emails gives people another reason to pay attention the next time you show up.
That’s how relationships are built.
And relationships are what make sales easier.
Let AI help you spot the gaps
One of my favorite ways to use AI isn’t to write my emails.
It’s to help me see what I might be missing.
Try this prompt:
I’ve pasted my last 10 marketing emails below. Pretend you’re a brand-new customer seeing these for the first time. What story do these emails tell about my business? Where do they build trust? Where do they become repetitive or overly promotional? What important parts of the customer journey are missing? Finally, suggest five educational or relationship-building emails that would naturally lead someone toward becoming a customer.
You may discover you’ve been asking people to buy long before you’ve given them enough reasons to care.
That’s an easy problem to fix.
And once you do, something interesting happens.
Your marketing stops feeling like the last two minutes of the play…
…and starts becoming a story people actually want to follow.
If anyone can make James Bond relevant, it’s you. I’m clicking and reading….
Hi Nadine,
Nice to see your face over at the Bucket. =)
Thanks for reading. I’m off to attend to your other comments.
Dave
Very useful read. Well worth reading to the end.
Your suggestions make a lot of sense.
I want to suggest that they make sense in a way that should encourage theatre folk to reconsider the entire way we make and market theatre.
If we are only engaging our audiences when we have a show, we are — as you say — only including them in the last two minutes of the whole project.
We need to engage our audiences back before our babies are born.
Artist love process; lots of our audience will love it as well. Let’s tell them about it; let’s include them.
Sure the baby is important but let’s be frank it’s the process of making the baby that’s the most fun.
Opening our audiences to the whole process will work very nicely with the email marketing approach you outline here.
Thanks Sterling. I appreciate that. I’ll have more to follow soon.
My goal is just that, to have people reconsider their whole approach. Businesses are trying to tell their stories in order to better market themselves. The arts have the power of stories built in. There’s also a built in magical quality. We just need to share.
If you can get people reading and looking forward to your emails instead of hitting the delete button, you’re one step closer to building longer term relationships. These will pay off. One of the most satisfying things this past year was working with a client and hearing from audience members, “we love reading your emails.”
If the audience is reading that’s good.
There are specific things you need to do. But the first step is recognizing there’s a better way than “e-blasting” people.