Storytelling over sales
A fresh approach to marketing emails
While my passion lies in content design, I take pride in being a flexible writer—one who’s just as comfortable crafting marketing content as I am shaping product experiences. This adaptability proved especially useful at komoot, a route planning and navigation app, where one of the teams I worked with focused primarily on campaigns and marketing initiatives.
For this particular project, we experimented with in-context promotions: when a user attempted to access sport-specific maps (a Premium feature), they would see an in-app modal promoting Premium, followed by a targeted email highlighting the feature and Premium as a whole.
Challenging the status quo
I felt that our emails were becoming repetitive, and this new promotional approach presented the perfect opportunity to experiment with a fresh writing style. However, knowing that the product manager was cautious about major changes that could impact revenue, I played it safe—I created two versions of the email:
A bold, out-of-the-box alternative—one that took a storytelling approach instead of a direct sales pitch.
A standard, well-crafted promotional email that aligned with our typical messaging (example below).
The power of storytelling
Thankfully, the product manager opted for the unconventional version. For this email, I interviewed Betty, a komoot employee and passionate outdoor adventurer, crafting a story about one of her great adventures. The email seamlessly tied in details about Premium features, but in a way that felt natural, engaging, and inspiring rather than sales-driven.
My goal was to create an email that felt like an invitation to make readers feel excited about their own potential adventures, with Premium as the tool to get them there.
The outcome and lessons learned
While the campaign launched successfully, the number of users who triggered this promotion was lower than anticipated, meaning we didn’t have concrete data on performance at the time of writing. Had there been more traffic, I would have loved to A/B test the two versions to compare click-through and conversion rates.
Even without hard numbers, this project reinforced an important lesson: marketing emails don’t have to feel like marketing. A compelling story can be just as (if not more) effective than a traditional sales message—something I’d love to explore further in future experiments.