Email marketing should be an integral part of your event photo companies marketing strategy. Even as inundated as we are with emails, we still check our inbox religiously. Heck, maybe even multiple times per day! Email marketing is easy to get into and it’s not hard to master, but you need to get the ball rolling if you haven’t already. This post isn’t going to go all into detail about email marketing and how to execute it, but we’ll start with some baby steps to help you get along. This will be our first post in a series of email marketing for event photographers and photo booth companies.
1. Create an account with an email marketing provider
You’ll need a place to store all the email addresses you collect and a system that helps you send these emails to the people on your list. Companies that provide these services are called email marketing providers. At PicPic Social we use Mailchimp. We initially started with Mailchimp years go, before the concept of PicPic Social was even a thought and we have stayed with them since. We initially started with Mailchimp because they had a free forever plan if you had under 2,000 people on the email list. They still have a freebie plan, and you should sign up with them too. The price is right and it’s a real powerful system. You can also look into Constant Contact or Mad Mimi.
2. Start collecting email addresses with PicPic Social
You can’t do email marketing without email addresses. Duuuuhhhh! We’re not going to go into what you should/can do with these email addresses yet. Remember, this guide is about taking baby steps! So, your baby step is to start collecting email addresses!
Social media kiosk users are a great source of potential business because they have interacted with your company and they are nor familiar with you! You’ve showed them how awesome your services are so you now have a leg up on the competition. After all, people are more likely to buy from people they “know”.
- Enable the data capture feature of PicPic Social (while using the disclaimer for opt-in) and start collecting email addresses of social media kiosk users at events.
- Use List Builder to collect email addresses – The My Gallery feature of PicPic Social EC collects email addresses of your photo gallery visitors. Turn the list builder on and collect the email addresses of your web gallery users.
3. Add potential clients to your email list
When you get an inquiry, ask the person if it’s OK to add them to your email list. Let them know you won’t SPAM them (because you won’t). Anyone who you interact with should have the opportunity to be placed on your list, because they won’t want to miss out on the goodies and extra special information that will be in the emails you send out.
Even if the person doesn’t book with you right then and there, they may be a great referral down the line once they receive the emails you send that are NOT spammy, but are instead filled with value! More on all that coming soon.
So, get to work people. Go create your email marketing account, go turn on your data collect in PicPic and start importing to your email service. And, start collecting the emails of potential clients.
