You always have someone's attention when you say those six words.

Not: "Hey, could you please click this link?"

Or these pitches that fill up inboxes around the world every day:

"Hey I've got something for you!"
(Umm, I didn't ask for it, and what will this cost, exactly?)

"Look at this amazing discount I've got for you." (Discount? How clever. That all you got?)

"Final notice" (Until the "last chance" one week later, right?)

Now let me be clear about something ...

I'm not saying those other approaches don't work.

They do. There's nothing inherently wrong with them.

But let’s get real. We’ve seen those already! A metric TON of them ...

... And STORIES work so much BETTER.

Need proof?

Well ... let me tell you a story (see what I did there :-)

A New York Times journalist once set out to prove the power of storytelling with a fascinating experiment.

Here's what he did ...

He gathered 200 cheap items, the kind you might find at a thrift store. Average cost: $1.25.

The items were totally ordinary ...

A plastic banana. An old wooden mallet. Even a plastic hotel room key.

You get the idea. These items had no intrinsic value whatsoever.

Next, he got some writers to agree to write a story about one of the objects.

He then auctioned the items on eBay with the stories added to the descriptions.

You probably know where this is headed.

I'll cut to the chase: The journalist originally paid a total of $197 for all 200 items.

But when sold on eBay with a single story written for each one?

They sold for a total of nearly $8,000.

That’s a markup of more than 6,300%.

For example, one of the items was a small plastic bust of a horse's head procured for exactly 99 cents at a thrift shop.

It was purchased for $62.95 when sold with a story.

So was the buyer a sucker?

Not at all. The simple answer is that stories add value because they tap into our emotions.

Never forget that we buy on emotion and justify with logic, not the other way around.

When we feel these emotions, we start operating on different criteria.

As Robert McKee once said ...

" To tell a story is to make a promise: If you give me your concentration, I'll give you a surprise, followed by the pleasure of discovering life at levels you've never imagined."