Slow season coincided with Valentine’s Day so I knew there was a story we could tell about eternal love in one of Better Place Forests' forests, but I didn’t want it to be a basic love campaign. The overarching theme of the campaign was about people who chose a memorial tree with a loved one as their final resting place—hence “Together Forever”. First, I worked with the customer success team to pull four compelling “love stories”. These unique love stories celebrated love between sisters, parents, children, newlyweds, and widows. Each story was compelling and captured a different experience that could resonate with our ICP.

Next, I needed to interview these customers to get their stories. This is a process I’ve duplicated many times since as a lightweight way to capture customer stories. First I script out questions that will evoke the narrative I’m looking for and then I ask those questions on a recorded Zoom call, allowing the customer to tell their story uninterrupted. I then transcribe the call, pulling the best quotes to create a customer story for the blog. I wrote 4 touching customer stories with this method.

Read the Together Forever blogs:

• One mother’s choice to leave a meaningful legacy for her son

• Creating a legacy of love in the Redwoods

• The newlyweds that chose eternity amongst the aspens

• Two sisters creating a new family tradition

We used these emotion-evoking stories to incentivize leads from 3 different forest locations to book a pitch in February 2021. Every week we’d send out emails to leads, differentiated by forest location, with the newest “love story”. To ensure that leads attended their pitches we offered a special gift for those who met with an SDR.

The gift we sent was a grow-your-own tree kit, specific to the forest they wanted to tour. For example, if you wanted to tour the Point Arena forest the lead was sent a redwood tree kit, and so on. We purchased these trees in bulk, removed their old branding, and hired a watercolor artist to recreate the packaging to create a beautiful experience for the gift recipient. These grow-your-own tree kits were a massive success and we continued to use them in future campaigns.

The Together Forever campaign surpassed total net sales, forest-specific net sales, and AOV goals. This campaign is a great example of how customer storytelling can drive revenue for a B2C startup.