Keep your photography business top of mind with a well-thoughtout, ongoing email campaign. These five tips will help you achieve enhanced email marketing ROI.

1. Obtain subscribers

You can’t send an email if you don’t have anyone to send it to. With today’s email privacy laws, getting permission to add someone to an email list is imperative. But remember, you already have a client list. Offer them a small discount or token of appreciation to sign up for emails. If you have social media followers, do the same. Followers come and go, and social media algorithms are constantly changing, so there’s no time like the present to see if they’ll join your email list.

The value of doing this is that you can remain in your customers’ thoughts via email if they subscribe. Photography may not always come to mind for people, and even if it does, your particular business may not come to mind. But if they receive quality email content from you, there’s a better chance they turn to you when they need photo services or their friends ask for recommendations.

2. Capture the attention of your audience

Know your target audience and write about topics that appeal to them. An enticing subject line and a relevant, engaging story has a better chance to garner attention from email recipients. Talking about yourself or bragging about your work does not.

You don’t need to be a writer. Brevity is fine, it’s the story that will drive the interest. You just need to be what your customers are interested in. Stand out. Find a niche. Test what works. Maybe your clients like humor, maybe they like quick tips, or maybe they like photo galleries with detailed descriptions. Your email analytics will help you figure out the formula.

If your business centers around baby photography, consider emails that have parenting tips, offer photoshoot ideas, or photo gift ideas for grandparents. Chances are that your customer base may be searching for these things anyway, so why not give them some helpful advice. You’ll stay out of the trash folder and be top of mind.

Do travel photos? Write about destination recommendations. Animal photography? Have a silly photo of a pet of the month. Nature photography? Maybe sharing awesome landscape photos is enough. Wedding photography? Surely your experience has given you some unique wedding ideas to pass on. Be of value and people will read your emails.

3. Call to action

Always have a call to action, or CTA, in your email. If you’ve gotten people to open your email and read it, there needs to be something to drive action. Perhaps there’s a tie-in to your article, such as 10% off back to school photos in your email discussing high school sports, teen fashion or hair styling trends. Offer a free package upgrade if someone refers a friend to you in your article about Thanksgiving family photo ideas.

4. Be consistent

You must be consistent to remain relevant and increase the chances of your email being opened. If someone gets an email once every six months from a company, they probably don’t feel very engaged with them, and they probably hit delete. The goal of this campaign is to drive constant engagement and provide content that subscribers may look forward to, or at the very least keep in their inbox.

5. Simplify with software

You may be able to start small with your personal email client, but email marketing software can help immensely. It will offer customers subscribe and unsubscribe features that work the proper way, give you analytics on your email performance so you can improve over time, and automate sends.

There are many tools out there, such as Moosend or MailChimp. Pricing, mailing limits, templates, forms and A/B testing are all important features to consider, but it comes down to the best tool that suits your particular needs at this particular time.

Best of luck engaging customers and being top of mind in email.