Why an Email Marketing Strategy Is Important in a Photography Business

With so many people on social media, how could it be possible that email marketing is a better strategy for a photography business? Social media obviously isn’t just a fad. And as a business owner, you definitely need to be everywhere your potential clients and customers are. Even if you are on multiple platforms, you still need to keep each one of them updated and current.

However, you shouldn’t be investing all of your time, energy and marketing funds into Facebook, Instagram, etc. And while yes, the main purpose for us photographers is to get our photography work out there and seen, we still need to be able to connect and cultivate relationships with potential clients with the end goal being more clients.

These are my opinions on why I feel email marketing is better than social media.

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Permission

When it comes to platforms like Facebook, there are so many businesses, big and small,  trying to get in front of their audience. It can actually feel overwhelming and chaotic in the newsfeed. So many individuals seeking out your attention. Inviting you to groups that you want no part of, MLM sales people sending you messages on Facebook and you just don’t even want to open it. On Instagram, most of the time they are complete and total strangers or bots. “Buy my product! It will change your life!” Ugh. At least a couple times a week I disconnect from Facebook to get away from it all. It’s not just the sales, but even the news stations are going above and beyond with ridiculousness to get you to click, interact, and even argue with others so their numbers will soar. It can drain your energy and happiness if you continue to let it. That is one of the reasons why I always strongly advise to anyone, never rely on social media for clients.

The one main thing email has over social media, you, as the consumer, have to give YOUR PERMISSION in order for companies and small businesses to contact you via email. You physically have to check a box, or enter your email voluntarily, if you think a company is worth hearing from. You get to make that decision. You get to decide what shows up in your inbox. And if over time you decide the business is no longer a good fit for you, you can make that decision freely and unsubscribe. You hold the power of your inbox content in your fingers.

If you have your email marketing strategy set up in your business, do not ever take your subscribers for granted. They are there voluntarily, and think you are worth hearing from.

Ownership

This is the second reason why I stress to beginners not to rely on social media for clients. Platforms in the past have failed and shut down. Myspace, Vine, Google +. Yes, even Google failed at something. Think about the followers you have right now on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, etc. If any of those platforms were to go away right this second, and never come back, how would you share your content? How would you reach your potential clients? What would your marketing strategy be? All of your followers would be gone. You don’t own your followers. The platform you are on does.

With email, your readers sign up to your newsletters. They are kept in a database on the email marketing platform that you use. I myself use Mailerlite. It’s very user friendly, the customer service is fantastic, and it’s free up to 1.000 subscribers. They are the only email platform that I know of that offers that many subscribers for free. All of my subscribers are stored on their database. However, once per month I will download my entire subscriber list to an excel sheet. If something were to ever happen to Mailerlite, because let’s be honest, there is always a chance of anything on the internet having issues, I have my list. I own my list. There isn’t one social media platform failure that can take that list away from me.

Know Like & Trust

While you can post all day every day on social media, because if you sent multiple emails to your readers daily, they would definitely get annoyed and unsubscribe, I know I would, it disappears. Social media posts are a dime a dozen. And then they fade away into the lost souls of the newsfeed. With email, it’s just you and the reader. No distractions, no creepy ads in the sidebar showing up after you just talked about said product, no drama, just you.

You got their attention once by them giving you permission to be in their inbox. Now, use this to your advantage. Let them get to know you, like you, and trust you. Trust = clients.