Why Email Marketing Matters for Photographers
In today’s day and age, there is nothing more valuable than your potential customers’ email address. This allows you to market to them in a consistent and measurable way. Not to mention, the cost of email marketing is fractional compared to other digital mediums like Meta and Google.
Social Media Is Rented Land
We have all heard the horror stories of a photographer who lost access to their social accounts for one reason or another and couldn’t get access back. Can you imagine how devastating this would be to your business? You spend all these years building your tribe and one day wake up and it’s completely gone! End of day, this is the difference between leasing a building and owning it.
Email Converts Better Than Organic Reach
We all love organic leads coming into our business, but the reality is there is not enough volume to make this a viable solution for growing revenue. Emails allow you to control the timing and content of messaging. We have all heard that you need to have 5+ interactions with clients before they convert. We need to build trust, nurture leads, and then ask for the business.
Organic traffic to our sites is a one and done, but with email we can continue to tap into these potential customers.
Follow-Up Is Where Most Bookings Happen
This is where conversions happen. We all get busy in life. Well, guess what? So do our customers. Sometimes following up and literally nagging our customers is the difference between success and failure. This is why tools like Disruptor Marketing are so powerful. They allow you to build out customized email nurturing sequences that nudge your clients along and hopefully get them to take action.
The Lifetime Value Opportunity
Over time, your email list should and will grow. This list is gold for your business. When you need to book more business, run a sale, etc., you are tapping into this list of emails. For example, you might have a list of names you collected running a headshot or boudoir campaign. But now it’s fall. Wouldn’t this same list of emails be ripe to market family photography to? Of course it would. This increases the overall lifetime value of your clients.
Winning new clients is significantly harder than reactivating a previous customer. They know you, your business, and if happy, they are just looking for another opportunity to work together.
The 3 Types of Emails Every Photographer Needs
Sending emails blindly is a recipe for disaster. You need a strategy. Below are 3 types of emails you should consider adding to your marketing calendar.
1. Lead Nurture Sequences
These are my favorite because these are geared toward keeping your brand in front of customers and building trust and authority with them. These can be educational-style emails, awareness emails about things that are new in the business, and as photographers, consider sending emails celebrating your recent photoshoots and sharing the results. These are easy emails for your customers to digest and don’t feel salesy, but keep our brand top of mind at the same time.
2. Sales & Promotion Emails
This is where the money is made. However, you need to be careful here. If you only email your customers when you are running a sale, you run the risk of ad fatigue where customers just start ignoring your emails or worse, unsubscribe. Now, don’t get me wrong, this works for some businesses. You just need to plan a strategy that makes sense for your business. Personally, I like a combination of educational emails and sales and promotions emails.
3. Relationship & Retention Emails
These are also great for keeping your list fresh and active. We want our clients opening our emails. Emails that keep our customers abreast of current events, special offers, celebrating anniversaries, etc., all lead toward stronger relationships and encourage customers to take action when we actually run a sale or promotion.
How to Build an Email Funnel for Your Photography Business
Email list building takes some serious thought and planning, but it’s not difficult. Follow the steps below and you will be on your way to growing your email list and growing your revenue.
Step 1 – Capture the Lead Properly
Sounds easy enough, right? But it’s a little more complicated, or at least it can be. Capturing the lead properly means we are not buying email lists from 3rd party companies. Why? Because the people did not opt-in to hearing from you. They don’t know you, and if this is how you start the relationship, they won’t trust you.
Instead, come up with an offer of some sort and use social media marketing to encourage people to sign up. This can be a downloadable PDF that you put together and design that talks about genre-specific items. For example, if you are a wedding photographer, maybe you put together a designed PDF highlighting and showing examples of the top 10 poses for wedding couples. This sets you up as the expert and now this new lead will more than likely be interested in hearing from you in the future.
Step 2 – Deliver Value Before Selling
Now, enter this customer into an email nurturing sequence. Continue to email them educational content, but make sure it’s relevant to what they signed up for — weddings. Now, it’s ok to have a soft sell at the bottom of the email encouraging them to contact you if they are looking for a wedding photographer, but it should not be the main message here.
Step 3 – Introduce the Offer
After sending several nurture emails, now is the time for the ask. Make sure whatever you are asking for is compelling. For example, sticking with the wedding example here, you could promote limited dates still available to receive a 10% discount off any wedding package. Contact us today for a no-pressure meeting to talk more about your big day. That’s an offer that would be compelling and have a high success rate of conversion.
Step 4 – Automate Follow-Up
All of these steps are and should be fully automated. If you drop someone into a lead sequence, follow up with them after a few days and ask them if they might have any questions. This is a great low-friction way to start a personalized interaction. While this step is and should be automated, any subsequent responses should be personal.
What to Send in Your Photography Email Campaigns
Remember, the goal is to get them to engage with your emails. We want them opening our emails and reading them. This serves as a signal to Google and others that your emails are not spam. So, we need to make sure we have a strategy when it comes to sending emails. Below is a list of ideas and recommendations for your email campaign strategy.
Educational Content
This is my personal favorite. Educational content is all about consumption and building trust. Customers are getting bombarded with emails each and every day. So, what makes yours different? Most retail brands are just spamming inboxes with sales and product offerings. And while that might work sometimes, for the most part it leads to an overstimulated list and people start ignoring emails.
Considering we are in the unique position as creatives to create compelling content, we should create educational content about our services. Think about what holds people up from booking. Maybe they don’t understand how the process works. So, use email to visually show them. You can use pictures or video to drive them to your site to learn more. I would recommend sending more educational emails than sales emails. In the end, it will convert better for you.
Behind-the-Scenes Stories
This is another area people love. It highlights the voyeur in all of us. We all love seeing behind the curtain when it comes to photoshoots and how you accomplished your final image. Highlight a customer, highlight their shoot, show behind-the-scenes images of the setup, and of course highlight the final images. Emails like this are very clickable. So obviously don’t put all this in an email. Instead, put a teaser image with a catchy headline and drive them to a landing page on your site.
Wouldn’t it be great if all leads were organic and we had no advertising expenses at all? Sure it would. But welcome to reality. We have to pay for attention and isn’t that what this is all about? A modern digital way of yelling “look at me, look at me!!”
Let’s take a look at when each option makes the most sense.
Testimonials & Social Proof
There is nothing better than real and genuine customer testimonials. In today’s marketplace this is a requirement. However, don’t wait for people to visit your website and dig around. Add emails like this to your nurture sequences. Deliver it as “featured customer.” Now you can tell a little story in the email about how they found you, what services they selected, and showcase their final results and their final testimonials. This can be done via traditional copy or be a simple vertical iPhone video to record their testimonial. I will say, today, video is real and authentic and well received by audiences.
Limited-Time Offers
If you are following the path I’ve been laying out, limited-time offers will do very well. Why? Because you have been giving, giving, giving your leads. So now, when you are finally asking for the business, you will see some activity from your list.
Be sincere in your offer. The worst thing you can do is present something as a limited-time offer and then 2 weeks later you are making the same limited offer again. Be creative in your offers and most importantly, enforce it within reason.
If we are running limited offers and someone calls a week later, that offer has unfortunately expired. However, if someone responds a day later, then yes, of course we will honor it. Why is this so important? Because you need your list to know when you are running limited-time offers you really mean they are limited. Just adding a note to this. Feel free to swap out limited time and limited availability. Both accomplish the same thing.
Seasonal Promotions
Similar to limited-time offers are seasonal promotions. These could be holiday-focused photoshoots. For example, as a boudoir photographer, you should be promoting the hell out of Valentine’s Day photoshoots. It’s a no-brainer. For families, you could focus on promoting fall family portraits or even Santa portraits. These are the types of seasonal promotions that people are going to pay attention to.
How Often Should Photographers Send Emails?
Putting a consistent schedule together is incredibly important to your overall success. Send too many and you risk spamming your email list. However, don’t send enough and you risk losing out on conversion opportunities and worst of all, you become irrelevant to your list.
Weekly vs Monthly
Weekly emails keep you relevant with your customers. Now, it’s important not to spam them with irrelevant emails, but weekly emails will keep you top of mind. For example, you could develop a weekly calendar that looks something like this.
- Week 1 – Behind the scenes on a recent shoot
- Week 2 – Featured Shoot of the Month
- Week 3 – What customers are saying
- Week 4 – Monthly Session Special or Discount
Monthly emails really put you in a difficult spot. It’s so infrequent that it risks turning into a newsletter-looking email which no one is reading. NO ONE. Today’s audiences have a nanosecond of attention. One email, one message. If you follow that, then you are handcuffed to a single message for the entire month. Also, you run the real risk of no longer being top of mind since they are hearing from you so infrequently.
I think it’s pretty clear, I’m a believer in weekly emails if not more frequently.
Launch Windows
When I’m getting ready to do something like a limited-time offer or sale, I like to promote this ahead of time and create a launch window for people to focus on. Sometimes, when people are busy, they really don’t have the mental capacity to take advantage of specials they receive. However, when you promote ahead of time and let them know on a certain date at a certain time registration or availability will happen, it can have a really positive effect.
An example of this: as a high school senior photographer myself, we would run a 75% off session fee sale every March/April. It was a 24-hour sale. We promoted this sale weeks before so people knew if they called and booked on this day we would give them the largest discount of the year. Every year, our phones are slammed on this promotional day booking sessions. This is how you create buzz for your brand.
Seasonal Campaign Planning
This is perfect to jump into examples like Santa or boudoir. Families need time to plan for these types of photoshoots. These are not impulse purchases by any means. So, by sprinkling in emails throughout the year with things like save-the-date or even early registration to create a limited availability mindset, this can really drive engagement with your list without feeling spammy.
Common Email Marketing Mistakes Photographers Make
- Only emailing when they need money — this smells like desperation and customers will see it that way. This is the fastest way to drive your business into the ground.
- No automation — let’s be honest, you are not going to remember to send emails. Sit down and put a monthly plan together and schedule these out via automations.
- Writing long, boring newsletters — I highlighted this above. No one is reading this stuff. One email. One message. Keep it simple. I would rather you email with more frequency than try to jam everything into a single email.
- No clear CTA — what’s the point of your email? What do you want me to do as a reader? You need a clearly visible call-to-action in your emails. Tell me what to do.
- Not segmenting list — you can’t group everyone into the same list. It’s very important to use tags on your client emails. Most email systems support tags. Use them to segment your list by client type or lead type.
Frequently Asked Questions: Email Marketing for Photographers
What is a good open rate?
Photographers love obsessing over open rates like it’s the scoreboard. It’s not.
That said, a healthy open rate for most photography businesses usually lands somewhere between 30–50%. If you’re below 25%, something’s wrong. Either your subject lines suck, your emails are boring, or your list is full of people who don’t actually care about what you do.
But here’s the bigger truth: open rates don’t pay your bills… bookings do.
I’d rather see a 30% open rate with people clicking and scheduling consultations than a 60% open rate where nobody takes action. The goal of email isn’t engagement. The goal is moving someone closer to booking you.
How big does my list need to be?
This is another place photographers get it backwards.
You don’t need a massive list. You need a relevant list.
I’ve seen photographers with 500 people on their email list book more work than someone with 5,000 subscribers who never send anything meaningful.
If you have:
- past clients
- current leads
- inquiries
- people who downloaded a guide or pricing info
You already have the foundation of a strong email list.
Focus less on the size of the list and more on the quality of the relationship you’re building with it.
Do photographers need automation?
Yes. Absolutely.
Without automation, email marketing becomes another thing on your to-do list that you’ll forget about the moment things get busy.
Automation means:
- every new lead gets immediate follow-up
- every inquiry receives helpful information
- every potential client is being nurtured toward a booking
Think of automation like a sales assistant that never sleeps.
While you’re shooting, editing, or sleeping, your emails should be working in the background, educating leads, building trust, and moving people closer to hiring you.
What platform should I use?
Honestly, the platform matters far less than photographers think.
- Mailchimp.
- ActiveCampaign.
- Disruptor Marketing.
They all send emails.
The real question isn’t what platform you use — it’s whether you actually use it consistently and have the right sequences built.
You don’t need the “perfect” software.
You need a simple system that captures leads and follows up automatically.
How do I avoid spam filters?
Most photographers don’t land in spam because of technical issues. They land there because they send bad emails.
Here are the basics:
- Don’t buy email lists
- Don’t send from brand new domains with no history
- Avoid spammy subject lines like “FREE!!!” or “LIMITED TIME OFFER!!!”
- Only email people who actually opted in
But the biggest factor is engagement.
If people open your emails, read them, and click links, email providers assume your content is valuable and keep delivering it.
If nobody interacts with your emails, they eventually start burying them.
In other words: write emails people actually want to read.
Should You Manage Email Marketing Yourself or Hire Help?
This is usually the point where photographers hit a wall.
They understand that email works. They understand they should be following up with leads. But then reality kicks in. You’re shooting, editing, answering inquiries, delivering galleries, running your business… and suddenly email marketing becomes another thing sitting on the “I’ll get to it later” list.
The problem is, later usually never comes.
And when there’s no system in place, leads slip through the cracks. Someone fills out your contact form, gets one reply from you, and then nothing. Meanwhile, they’re talking to two or three other photographers who are following up consistently.
That’s why systems matter.
You can absolutely manage email marketing yourself if you’re disciplined about it. You need to build the sequences, write the emails, set up the automations, and track what’s working. Once it’s built, it runs in the background and keeps nurturing leads while you focus on shooting and running your business.
But most photographers don’t want to spend their nights learning marketing automation or writing email sequences. They want to focus on the work they actually enjoy: Photographing clients and delivering great images.
That’s where having the right system, or the right team behind you, changes everything.
Instead of guessing what to write or when to send it, you’re using proven email sequences designed specifically for photographers — the same kinds of campaigns that turn cold leads into consultations and consultations into booked clients.
If you’re tired of chasing leads and want a marketing system that actually runs in the background of your business, that’s exactly what we help photographers build at Disruptor Marketing.
Because email marketing shouldn’t feel like another job.
It should feel like a system that helps your business grow while you’re doing the work you love.
Want to learn more? Click here to check out how disruptor marketing can help your photography business grow.
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