An introduction to creating effective email campaigns

Postcard mailers have been a standard promotional tool for photographers for decades. And while they still serve an important function, email blasts have largely overtaken postcards as the preferred way for photographers to reach out to potential clients and keep in touch with existing clients.

Email has many advantages over postcards. With email, you can track who receives your message, who opens it and if they click-through on any images or links. You can also create a richer and more interactive experience by designing the email in a way that allows the recipient to access progressively more information. Tracking the behavior of the recipient can also tell you what people find most interesting about you and your work. This type of marketing information is priceless. Last but not least, the cost of sending an email blast, while not as inexpensive as many think, is much less expensive than printing and mailing postcards.

But a poorly designed email campaign can be ineffective or even damaging to your reputation.

Here are 10 things you need to keep in mind when planning and sending your email campaign:

1. Start With a Good List
The best list consists of names of people who have asked to hear from you. Legally, these are the only people you should ever address with a mass email. Otherwise what you are sending is considered SPAM. Bought lists are only legal to use if the people on the list gave their permission to the list collector to receive unsolicited emails from people selling photographic services. Always check to see if this is the case. Even then, the quality of the list can vary widely. In all your activities, try to get people to agree to receive marketing emails from you. This is your “golden” list.

2. Send Regularly
You should use your email campaign to create and sustain a relationship with the recipients. Sending them monthly is ideal. Every other month is the minimum frequency you should consider. If you send out promotional emails more than once per month you run the risk of creating “noise” that your audience will find easy to ignore.

3. Respect the Subject Line
Your subject line should do three things: 1) contain your name so recipients can immediately identify that it’s from you; 2) be compelling so the audience wants to open the email to see what’s inside; 3) not contain words or word combinations that are likely to trigger spam filters.

4. Invest in a Good Design
Unlike promotional postcards that photographers typically send out, and email needs to be more than just a picture and some text. With the huge volume of emails that most people receive, yours really needs to stand out as a well-designed piece of work. The challenge is similar to designing a print ad; one that will catch a reader’s attention as they flip through a magazine filled with ads.

5. Create a Compelling Message
You need to have a reason to send the email. Perhaps you’re showing off recent work or featuring work you’ve done over a period of time on a specific theme. Just sending some good images isn’t enough. Make it clear why you are featuring the images in the email, and in fact why you are sending an email at all.

6. Include a Call To Action
Make people want to click on the links in your email. Use pictures and language that promise a rewarding experience if they follow the links.

7. Reward the Action
Don’t link the email to your home page. That’s like inviting someone into your home and then making them stand out front to ring the door bell to see if you’re home. Also, unless you plan on changing your home page every time you send out an email, each time they receive and email, if they click on link they’ll end up looking at your home page again. After this happens once or twice they just go away. Instead, each email should link to a dedicated landing page that expands upon whatever was featured in the email.

8. Make it Technically Compliant
Web browsers are fairly consistent in the way that they display HTML Web pages. Unfortunately, mail clients vary greatly in how they present their content. This is partially due to the way they render HTML. This is also due to how they handle previews and what they regard as SPAM. Enterprise-wide email systems used in big corporations, where a lot of you email will likely be going, are among the most finicky. If you’re hiring a designer for your email campaign, be sure he or she understands how to create broadly compliant emails. If you’re doing it yourself, take the time to research this to get it right. And before you send out a campaign, test it several times to a test groups. At a minimum you should send the test to email accounts that are read through Microsoft Exchange, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, MSN Mail and Thunderbird.

9. Create an Alt Text Version
Some email programs will look at an HTML email and decide that it’s too risky to allow the whole thing through but will instead allow only text. It will look for a file that travels with an HTML email called an Alt Text file. Be sure that the Alt Text file can stand on it’s own. For example, if in your HTML message a link says “click here”, in the Alt Text version you will need to write out the url. It can be a challenge to create a compelling email promoting photography without using any pictures but you have to assume a certain percentage of your audience will only receive the Alt Text version.

10. Use an Emailing Service
For a relatively small amount of money you can save yourself a lot grief by using an emailing service. There are literally dozens of them. (To see a list of some of these services, click here. They each have their own pricing model and feature set but most are competitively priced and provide a huge amount of assistance in creating and managing your campaigns. These include providing technically compliant templates or offering assistance in creating your own; managing your mailing list, including automating the opt-out requirement; providing guidance or tools for testing your campaigns and making it easy to track clicks, paths and forward, critical information for learning what your audience finds most compelling. Also, emails sent from emailing services are much less likely to trigger SPAM filters than emails send from a personal a DSL or cable ISP (Internet Service Provider) account.

The benefits of email campaigns are substantial but creating a professional and effective campaign in not a trivial undertaking. A well-designed campaign can be a highly cost-effective marketing tool. Take the time, and make the investment, to do it right.

Quick Tip
Call Your Fans

One of the great things about emailing services is that they allow you to easily track the behavior of people who receive your emails. They show you the number of people who received the email, as well as who opened it, clicked on a link, which links they clicked on and if they forwarded it to anyone.

If you see that several individuals not only opened the mail but also clicked on one or more links and then forwarded the message to others, this is someone you should get to know better. Don’t be shy about calling them up and saying “I noticed that you took the time to look at my recent email campaign. Is there anything in particular I can help you with?”

Jon Hornstein is Principal of Creative Touchpoint, a marketing services firm for photographers, reps and stock agencies. You can learn about Creative Touchpoint here. You can send Jon email at jon@creativetouchpoint.com.

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