Eloquent emails took me from customer to super fan

A newsletter can reveal your personality, elevate your brand, and create loyal followers.

A small mom-and-pop stationery store in Toronto produces the most eloquent, poetic emails… And those weekly emails keep me shopping.

Copywriters strive to choose the perfect word. As Elisa wrote in this post, we’re inundated with messages everyday. As business owners, we assume the only way to cut through the noise is to say something quickly. Time is expensive. 

It’s true, good copy makes the point fast. But GREAT copy takes the reader and transports them into feeling something deeper. 

Take my favourite store, Wonder Pens, in Toronto. Liz and Jon Chan are a young couple with tiny kids and two cats. In their weekly email to customers, Liz captures the messy, beautiful whirlwind of parenting while running a small business. It reminds me of our life and the chaos and joy raising little rug rats.

Life and time continue their endless parade, all of us playing our various roles: clowns, Santa, marching band, crying children, blimps, pylons. We blow our trumpets and bang our drums into the wind, how else to explain the endless din? And yet every once in a while we attempt to slow down, to sharpen a pencil, to fill a fountain pen with some sort of potion that will give us all the answers we need, scribble down some notes in a meeting, everyone attempting to look busy and brilliant, or maybe crack open our journals, not sure what’s going to come out. 

Liz blogs too. She wraps her words around beautiful photos that manage to show the journals, pens, and ink they sell while staying true to the little shop’s vibe.

Even a mea culpa draws us into deeper relationship with the store: 

“We have restocked on Ferris Wheel Press inks, including the Sunlit Jade which I somewhat inconveniently wrote about in a recent blog post, when it was out of stock, Jon moaning as I calmly sipped my tea after hitting publish.” 

I love fountain pens. I love the scratch of the nib on paper. I love choosing vibrant ink colours that wake up the page. I love falling asleep watching fountain pen reviews on YouTube while dreaming of the next pen for my collection.

There are a handful of good online fountain pen retailers in Canada but I shop at Wonder Pens because the Chans are sharing their story. I buy from Wonder Pens because I like the Chans. I want to be their friend.

How can you add something personal to your social media or emails with customers? Your clients want to like you. Give them a reason to become fans.