Best Email Marketing Ideas for Photographers in 2023

Whether you’re a budding photographer or a seasoned professional, you’ve probably considered how email marketing may help your business.

With 69% of marketers using email marketing to distribute content (Content Marketing Institute, 2023), it’s no surprise you’ve had email marketing on your mind. As a photographer, your work is purely visual, so it’s super important to get your work out there so that people can see how great you are at what you do and engage with your brand.

If you’re confused about where to start, don’t worry. We’re here to talk you through the top email marketing ideas for photographers, as well as some top tips for creating your own email template to show off your stunning photography.

Email Marketing Ideas For Photographers

In the section below, we’ve collated some top email marketing ideas for photographers, to give you a step-by-step process on how to get more exposure for your photography brand.

If you haven’t done so already, make sure to get the basics right first by taking a look at the below steps:

• Choose an email marketing tool - By selecting a great platform through which to send your emails, you’ll be saving yourself so much time in scheduling, storing emails, and creating beautiful emails. beehiiv has so much to offer when it comes to email marketing for photographers, including pre-made email templates, audience segmentation and monetization opportunities. Sign up for a free trial here to find out more!

• Build an email list - Make sure that your website and social media channels are actively promoting your email marketing lists, as this will help you to build up a good following of interested subscribers for you to market your content to.

• Decide a schedule and stick to it - It’s important to update your audience regularly so that you’re always on their radar, but you don’t want to bombard them so that they’re sick of hearing from you. Choose a schedule such as once a week or a few times a month and stick to this so that your subscribers know when they’ll hear from you next.

What Are Some of the Best Ideas for Email Marketing?

Without further ado, let’s get into some of the best ideas for email marketing for your photography business.

Provide an Incentive

One of the main aspects that people struggle with when it comes to email marketing is building a mailing list, so we’ve got a great tip for you to make this super easy.

Always provide an incentive for signing up to your mailing list. User data is precious, and people won’t hand it over for no reason, so the best way to sign up new subscribers is to offer them something of value in return for their email address.

This could be a freebie or discount code that they receive once they’ve signed up for your mailing list. This benefits the subscriber as they’ll get something for free, and you’ll have access to their email address for future emails. Everybody wins!

Use Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is another great idea for email marketing for photographers, as it allows you to streamline your email marketing efforts and send subscribers more tailored emails.

Here’s an example. You have some great photography of the UK countryside and are keen to get this in front of people that live in the UK. You can segment your audience by demographic, and create a list that is purely made up of people that are based in the UK and are more likely to be interested in this type of photography.

This should improve your engagement rates as you’ll be providing your audience with content that is more tailored to them. Here’s some more info on how to get started with audience segmentation.

Create Engaging Content

Keeping your content engaging and concise is important with email marketing in general, especially if you’re running a photography business.

Avoid large reams of text as this can be difficult to read and potentially unnecessary. Due to the nature of your trade, most of your subscribers will be focused on seeing the beautiful imagery that you produce.

Content includes your imagery - make sure to keep images compressed where possible. Large images can result in them not loading correctly when a user receives an email, and can also increase the chance of your email landing in spam folders.

Compelling subject lines

A compelling subject line is another key idea for email marketing in your photography business. Your audience will be receiving many emails a day from other brands, so it’s important to grab your subscribers’ attention at the first instance with a catchy subject line.

It doesn’t have to be click-bait, just ensure it’s implying that there’s something exciting within the email that the user will want to see. Here are 20 subject lines that get emails opened to give you some inspiration!

How Do I Write an Attractive Email for Marketing?

Writing an attractive email for marketing may seem a little overwhelming, but in reality, it’s super easy.

You’ll want to keep most of the content in your email based on your photography, but bear in mind these tips to write a super attractive email for marketing your photography brand:

• Keep content short and sweet - Any email that has pages and pages of text will be unappealing to a reader, particularly if they subscribed predominantly to keep updated with your latest photography. Keep your content short and sweet - you can always link out to landing pages with more info via your website/blog.

• Include strong Calls To Action - Calls To Action (CTA) are super important with any email newsletter, as they direct users to where you ultimately want them to go. This could be a link to purchase from your portfolio or to check out a project you’ve detailed on your blog. Whatever the goal, make sure you know what the aim of your newsletter is and the relevant CTAs to achieve this.

• Link back to your website/social media - You should also make it as easy as possible for your subscribers to find your other content via your newsletters. This could be in the form of links back to your website or blog as mentioned above, or footer links that take users to your social media channels.

How Do I Create a Marketing Email with Pictures?

Creating a marketing email with pictures is probably one of the aspects of email marketing that you’re most interested in, given that your business is in photography.

A quick way to create a marketing email with pictures is to use a premade template. The beehiiv system has plenty of templates for you to choose from, and allows you to drop images into your newsletter in a clear, formatted way.

It’s important to make sure you choose the best images when adapting your template to really show your audience what you’re capable of, and also make sure to always compress your images to keep the email size down and reduce the chance of images not loading.

Email Marketing Ideas For Photographers (Closing Thoughts)

Hopefully, you’re now full of inspiration and are eager to go create your next photography email newsletter! So how do you get started?

Simply sign up for a free trial with beehiiv to start making use of all the tips and tricks we’ve gone through in this guide. There are some fantastic features for photographers such as ready-made templates, custom HTML, and audience segmentation, as well as many other features to help you scale your photography business.

Get started today with beehiiv - we’re excited to see what you come up with!