by Cindy Bracken
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Monthly or quarterly newsletters are a great way to stay in touch and create an ongoing relationship with your customers. If you aren’t doing them already, you should! Newsletters are a highly effective and low cost way to market your photography business.
If you are worried about the cost of mailing a newsletter – don’t be. You can email them! There are services that can help you with the logistics of setting up your newsletter (or ezine as it is sometimes called) and emailing it out to your list.
Email newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with current customers and get new customers for your photography business at the same time. It has been proven that most visitors to your website do not return after their initial visit. Capture their email address and contact them once a month or so with some news, tips, and fun info and suddenly they become a valued customer!
But how do you get subscribers for your photo business newsletter? The easiest way to do this is to have some sort of “address capture” on your website. This is usually in the form of a little box that says something like: “Keep up to date on all the happenings in our studio by signing up to receive our monthly newsletter!” Then there is a space for the viewer to type in their email address and hit enter. They are then automatically subscribed to your list. To see this little gem in action go to my homepage (www.shuttermom.com) and find that little yellow box on the right. You can customize the look and feel of yours to fit your site.
How does this work? Well, you are going to need an email marketing service. The one I use is called Constant Contact and I’ve had really great results with them. Click on their ad at the top of this page for more info on signing up). They are inexpensive and super easy to use. They will even provide the html code for those great little sign up boxes we talked about. All you have to do is cut and paste the code and you are ready to go.
Things to include in your photography business newsletters:
I’m sure you can think of many other things to include in your photo business newsletters. Just remember to make them personal (not too formal). Try to write them as you would write to a friend. Before you know it, you will have a nice long list of loyal customers!
© October 2006 by Cindy Bracken. This article may not be copied without permission from the author.