Email Marketing For Photographers In 2024 [Guide]

Photography business owners seek effective ways to promote their work, attract new clients, and keep loyal ones around the corner. Is email marketing one of them? With an ROI of $42 for every dollar spent, the answer should be yes.

In this guide, we’ll explore the essentials of email marketing for photographers, including:

• benefits for businesses, and
• how to streamline it successfully to reach your desirable results.

Whether a novice or a pro in this marketing area, find inspiration to upgrade your promotional efforts and increase conversions.

Benefits Of Email Marketing For Photographers

Let’s see some of the top advantages of adding email newsletters to your existing marketing strategy:

It’s a cost-effective solution

Firstly, it’s a cheap solution to set up even with many subscribers in your contact lists, considering that many email newsletter software solutions like Moosend or MailerLite offer affordable and flexible pricing plans.

Compared to other digital marketing methods with excellent targeting capabilities, such as Facebook or Instagram ads, it’s more accessible for small businesses and easier to manage.

You can send personalized messages

Email marketing enables you to send tailored messages to subscribers with shared characteristics through email segmentation and automation to gain their attention and trust. This way, your key metrics, such as open rates and conversions, will rise.

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For example, if you’re a wedding photographer, sending different content to potential clients and those you’ve previously worked with is a great practice. You can convince the first to book your services and the latter to refer you to friends and family.

The contact lists belong to you

One of the main privileges of email marketing is that you are in charge of your contact lists. That’s not the same with social media channels most photography businesses use to promote their services and work, which are prone to algorithm changes.

Therefore, to avoid such mishaps, you can invest more in your email marketing efforts to ensure you’ll always have access to your followers and clients.

How To Create An Email Marketing Strategy For Photography Businesses

If you’re an email marketing beginner and want to get off to a good start, here’s how to do it:

1. Set your email marketing goals

One of the first questions to ask yourself is what exactly you’d like to achieve through your email marketing campaigns. Here are the primary objectives businesses have:

• Boost brand awareness
• Nurture existing customers
• Increase your sales
• Promote your referral program

Each email campaign should serve a specific purpose with relevant email content to appeal to the target audience. You can use the well-known SMART framework to help you elevate your goal-setting efforts.

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Finally, it’s important to remember that these goals are dynamic. You should revisit them as your business and audience grows. You should also create buyer persona profiles to ensure your messages are relevant and fruitful.

2. Choose an email marketing platform

The next step is to choose an email marketing service to keep everything in one place. Here’s what to look for in these platforms before checking their pricing page:

Overall, you need a user-friendly dashboard with great functionality to help you complete related tasks easily.

It’s also important to check the email templates each platform offers to see if they match your branding needs.

Are you looking for an email marketing platform with a 98% deliverability rate? Then sign up for a Moosend account and get a free trial to explore our stellar features.

Give it a try!

3. Grow your email list

How can you get current and prospective customers to sign up for your email list? You can employ several tactics on different channels to motivate your visitors to complete the desired action.

Firstly, you can insert a signup form into your photography website, pop-up or static, inviting users to subscribe. Usually, an incentive like a free resource can shield the deal faster.

Here’s an example by Mel Volkman, offering access to limited resources as an incentive:

If you use social media platforms as your primary attraction point for new customers, you can add a sign-up link to your bio. Plus, you can host a giveaway contest and ask participants to give their email and agree to opt-in as an exchange.

Here are a few more email list-building methods:

• Add a link in your professional email signature
• Create interesting lead magnets
• Design relevant, converting landing pages
• Create a referral program

4. Design compelling email campaigns

Is there a secret recipe for creating beautiful email newsletters that convert? Well, not exactly, but there are specific tactics that increase open and click-through rates.

It all starts with an intriguing subject line that will make your newsletter stand out in your subscriber’s mailbox. It should be up to 60 characters, reflective of the email content, and intriguing enough for your target audience.

Then a clear outline with clever email copywriting is key to maintaining your reader’s attention. For your own industry, it’s important to add high-quality photos to showcase your work and attract new clients.

Then you need a call-to-action that will motivate your readers to click through and continue their valuable journey with your brand. The button should stand out from the rest of the text, and the copy line should entice them to take action through a sense of urgency.

Here’s an amazing example by Death to Stock:

Subject line: ON THE JOB 👩‍🍳

Adding an email footer with valuable information about you, such as your social media channels, is also wise. Finally, an unsubscribe link is a must to avoid increasing your spam complaints in the future.

5. Analyze your results

Now that your first email campaigns have been delivered, how can you monitor the results to ensure that you’ve met your goals?

Thankfully, most email service providers have advanced analytics and reporting capabilities to help you understand what works and what aspects you’d better improve. Here are the top email metrics to track:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversions
• Bounce rate
• Spam complaints
• Unsubscribes

You won’t know what your subscribers want from day one, but you’ll gradually get a clear picture of their preferred email content and needs. If these metrics start to drop, it’s time to revisit your practices and clean your subscriber lists if needed.

Want to learn how to increase your open and click-through rates successfully? Check out our video tutorial:

Pro Email Marketing Tips For Photographers

If you’re looking for more ways to maximize lead generation and conversions, here are some pro tips that apply to photography businesses:

1. Segment your audience

When your list starts growing, you’ll probably have to meet different expectations based on the types of subscribers you have. This is even more important if you offer various photography services, for example, for weddings or kids’ parties.

You can utilize audience segmentation to meet all different needs and send personalized messages to all subscribers. Divide your audience into segments based on shared characteristics, such as demographics and preferences, and craft suitable content for them.

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If you segment your subscribers efficiently, you’ll reap the benefits of this tactic and gain your audience’s trust by delivering messages that matter to them.

2. Send a welcome email

One of the most successful email campaigns that receive high open rates is the well-known welcome email. New subscribers expect a message from you when they subscribe to reassure themselves that they made it to your list. Hence, they’re highly likely to interact with those campaigns.

So what makes a welcome email attractive and effective? Firstly, express your gratitude for showing their preference for you using your brand tone of voice. Then showcase some of your most representative photos to win their hearts.

Finally, you can include other elements, such as testimonials or top-of-mind articles, to gain their full attention and make them click through.

3. Set up automated emails

One of the leading email marketing assets is the ability to set up automated workflows to reach out to subscribers at critical times during the customer journey. Thus, you save valuable time by setting up a workflow just once, and you provide personalization at its best.

This series of emails is triggered based on specific user actions, such as sign-ups, website visits, or cart abandonment. For example, if you spot through your CRM that certain users spend lots of time on your website browsing a specific page, you can send them follow-up newsletters with relevant content to nurture them.

Most email marketing platforms make crafting these automation workflows a piece of cake. They follow if/then conditional logic and usually offer premade recipes to help you.

Here’s an example of a workflow aiming to thank new customers for choosing you:

4. A/B test your campaigns

If you want to ensure that your content will resonate with your audience and you’re uncertain about specific elements such as your email subject line or preheader, you can resort to A/B testing.

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This method helps marketers understand which email variation will appeal more to subscribers and go with the winning version. It allows you to collect valuable data about your audience before sending your email campaign to increase your metrics.

5. Create a consistent experience

If you want your customers and prospects to recognize your photography business straightaway, focus on your branding and positioning. Creating a unified experience across channels is vital so that people remember and hopefully resonate with your messaging.

However, it’s important to remember that different channels may attract different audiences, so while your logo and statements remain the same, you should occasionally adapt your messages to match each platform. For example, TikTok has younger audiences than Facebook, so keep that in mind to nail your copywriting.

Finally, if you insert a landing page or signup form into your email, ensure they have a similar design to it so that readers trust the content.

6. Mind your deliverability rates

Finally, you won’t reap the benefits of email campaigns if they end up in the spam folder. This can happen for multiple reasons, ranging from full mailboxes to wrong email addresses.

You can tackle this issue in multiple ways. Firstly, pick an email marketing platform that guarantees a high deliverability rate.

For example, Moosend can reach up to 98! Secondly, You can enable a double opt-in process to ensure the email addresses are correct, as Haris Nukem does:

Finally, you should conduct regular list cleaning to reduce your bounce rates and spam complaints.

The Takeaways

So if you are still wondering if you should use email marketing to promote your photography business, it’s time to get started. Not only will it maximize your brand awareness, but it will also boost your ROI in the long term.

Choose an email marketing platform, build your email list, and get as creative and strategic as possible to craft mesmerizing content for your subscribers. If you’re looking for an affordable all-in-one solution, sign up for a Moosend 30-day free trial to test our features.

FAQs

Here are some short answers to the most frequently asked questions about this topic:

1. How do you email prospective photography clients?

Share important information about your brand, add links to your portfolio, and consider adding customer testimonials for social proof.

2. What email should I use for my photography business?

Prefer a professional email address including your brand name, as a plain one may look suspicious to readers or ISPs.

3. How to attract clients through email?

Write attractive subject lines, create relevant and exciting content, and add a call to action that implies a sense of urgency.