You’re a professional photographer, which also makes you an entrepreneur, a business owner and a marketer. To grow your digital photography business, you must communicate with a prospective customer base as well as your past and current customers, regularly. For many professional photographers, email marketing is one of the most efficient and effective methods to reach these audiences, given the prohibitive cost and broad targeting of traditional mass media and other marketing tactics.

Email marketing doesn’t require the expense of creating and producing flyers, direct mail pieces, ads, etc. It allows you to target a specific list or lists of customers that are more likely to need your services. You may not communicate with as many people as a TV commercial, but your email-marketing list should contain a higher percentage of potential customers who would hire a professional photographer.

Much has been written about how to plan, implement and manage successful email marketing campaigns, and there are even classes you can attend or DVD-based instruction. If you would like to use email marketing to promote your business or you are currently, but it’s not producing the results you would like, then, by all means, read a book on the subject and/or seek instruction on all the details.

This PhotographyTalk article highlights 3 essential email-marketing components that tend to be overlooked or not utilized to their full potential. Failing to give them proper attention and using them correctly limits the effectiveness of your email marketing.

Subject Line

The subject line phrase or wording is extremely important because almost everyone receiving your email will read it, but only a relatively small percentage will actually open and read the contents. It might be better to think of the “subject line” as the headline of your email. Like all good headline writing, it needs to be as short as possible and contain the essence of whatever special offer you are promoting within the email.

A professional photographer who specializes in high school portraits:

“Free Stylish Frame with Your Next Order”

A wedding photographer:

“Free Framed Wedding Portrait for Orders Received this Week”

“15% Off When You Book Your Wedding Today”

When you don’t have a special offer to drive your email campaign, you could use testimonial statements from your past and current customers as the subject line. Make sure you type them within quotation marks to help emphasize that they are the statements of others.

“My wedding photos couldn’t have been better!” Amy and Sean

“Everyone at school thinks my picture makes me look hot!” Katie

“Steve knows the area so well that we always purchase his Montana wildlife images.” Sue Smith, editor

Alt Tags

An alt tag is the wording that appears when images are not displayed in a recipient’s email. Since turning off, or not displaying images, is a growing trend among email clients and users, you have the opportunity to use the alt tag space for more promotional language. Instead of an alt tag title, such as “Photo of the Week,” consider “15% off your next wedding” or “Free Gift! Book your portrait today!”

Pre-header Text

Pre-header text is the wording after the subject line in the listing of an email in your inbox (highlighted in the example below).

This month’s newsletter – Now’s the time to book your photographer for a June wedding.

Typically, the pre-header text is a duplicate of some part of the first text block in your email. You may actually be able to disregard the pre-header text if the copy it duplicates from the email is already a strong message that will compel recipients to open it. The short space that contains the pre-header text could be considered the “pre-headline” of your email. As an email user yourself, then you know that the wording of this “pre-header” often determines whether you open an email. Make sure you always pay attention to the pre-header text and maximize its pull on recipients to read further.

Learn more ideas about how to market your professional photography business, when you click here.

People who read this PhotographyTalk.com article also liked:

Your feedback is important to thousands of PhotographyTalk.com fans and us. If this article is helpful, then please click the Like and Re-Tweet buttons at the top left of this article.