Sep

Marketing Campaigns for Photographers – The Newsletter

There’s nothing simpler than creating a monthly newsletter that I’m surprised more photographers don’t do it.

After all, you have a big database of past clients that at some point you’ll want to ask if they’d like to use your services again. You will also, I’m guessing, be pretty keen to have their network of friends know about and hire you too.

Your blog is certainly a wonderful platform to post about your photographic adventures as is Facebook and all the other social networks but it’s unlikely that all of your clients will be subscribing to your RSS feed or watching your every move.

A monthly email newsletter is the perfect way of just reminding people of who you are, what you do and how good at it you’re getting!

A few things you might want to include in your newsletter:

Promotions
Don’t build the whole newsletter around these but make sure they are prominent.

Competitions
Include images that you’ve either entered into a competition or have information about a competition your are hosting. It’s all very well telling people you are going to give away a free canvas every month but people like to see that someone is winning!

Images
Your are a photographer after all! Sharing your favourite images from the past month makes your newsletter more interesting and is a great way to promote your work.

Variety
If you photograph lots of different subjects and in different styles then make sure your newsletter represents that.

Location Features
Perhaps you’ve shot at a wedding venue for the first time or you’ve found a great new location for portraits. Share your findings and soon people will be asking about them.

Reference blog posts
Ideally you don’t want your newsletter to be too long so an easy way to achieve this is to reference blog posts. It’ll also have the added benefit of driving more traffic to your website.

Behind the scenes
A client the other week said to me “You must have the best job in the world!” People are genuinely interested in what is a pretty cool job to have. Don’t be afraid to share what it’s really like to do your job. Some clients might gain a new appreciation for your work.

Calls to action
All this great content is all very well but make sure it has a purpose.

Where to start
MailChimp offers a wonderful (and free to an extent) email service with lots of extras including detailed statistics and website widgets and sign-up tools.

Don’t have a big client list?
You can’t get more personal than printing out a nice newsletter on headed paper and sending that out in the post. You can also include vouchers and promotional flyers in these too. You’ll be paying a small sum for printing and postage but I’m sure you’ll get a good response rate.

Michael Shilling I divide my time between being a photographer, retoucher, photography blogger and podcaster. Deep down I like to consider myself a portrait photographer and in my short 10 ten years in the business I’ve taken over 100,000 people’s studio portraits. When I’m not taking pictures I’m writing about it, most of my rambles can be found daily at http://photocreative365.com.