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Email Marketing

Do you guys, do you guys do any email marketing blasts? Do you guys do any of that? No one. Seriously. Okay. So email marketing's definitely not what it was in 2004 when you got an email and you opened every single email that came in your box 'cause you were super jacked that someone emailed you. Now it's definitely you aren't gonna hit the open rates that you did at that time. But it is a very, very cost effective way to stay in touch with your clients. And it's an important tool to use. So you need to start getting data. You need to start an email list. And this isn't for volume stuff. This is for you traditional portrait stuff. You need to start getting client emails. When they're booking sessions, get an email. And this isn't even in here but like, it's crazy the data you can do with these. I have an email list, I have a pretty extensive email list, I can now go onto Facebook and do targeted Facebook marketing so I will pay to advertise only to the people whose email addresses I ha...

ve. I can use my email list to generate super specific targeted marketing. So this stuff, it's all about just keeping the attention of these people. You just don't want them to think of someone else. If they're thinking about you, they're not thinking about someone else. So once we start getting our data list. We start collecting the email addresses. We start promoting stuff. Like family sessions. We promote like our lives depend upon to. That is the easiest way for me to make money off of sports. Is to get families. Why families and not seniors? 'Cause every one of those kids is part of a family. Very few of them are high school seniors. That is what we want to hit. We want to hit families first. So I will run a promotion. We will print fliers. We will do different sales. To entice people to come in. We've done spring family photography. We do $39 session. And you get a 60 minute session for a photo shoot up to six people. Eight wallets. One eight by 10. And one sharing digital file. Sharing digital file is 800 pixels on the long end and watermarked. It is good for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It is non-printable. If you'd like to purchase a file that you can produce a product with that is not included in this promotion. Although we would love to sell it to you. And a bunch more. We bring that into the equation. That's our deal. You get the free session. It's valued at $200. You get an eight by 10, eight wallets, one digital sharing file. And all of those are the same picture. Say one image. So my goal is to shoot that session so they gotta buy more than one. We've also done a little bit more complex ones. This is the same basic program. But you'll see that we bring in families from the community again. We push it in. I also have at the very bottom of this one, my name is Matthew Kemmetmueller. I took the reigns of Kemmetmueller Photography from my father. Many of you know the roots of this business go much deeper than that. My father founded the company in 1972. Long before the invention of digital photography. And we would post, or will send this. I want it to be personal. I put my picture on it. My picture. And my wife. My dog. Come on in. We sign stuff. Your biggest fan. I want people to think I really like 'em. And I do. But it's a big thing to make the connection personal. People want to business with people they know. So, we're gonna start building that list. Right now. We reach out to our clients three maybe four times a year. That's it. I don't want to do a monthly newsletter. I don't wanna be bi-weekly. Because they will hate me. It'll become annoying and they will not come back. And they will unsubscribe. And my content, like if it's not good content that I'm sending them, if it's not relevant information, they will just overlook it and my impact will drop substantially. And we make sure that what we email them with different incentives that we vary them throughout the year. We don't want it to be the same exact deal four times a year. So one of the times that we tend to slow down is February. February I got like nothing really going on. We don't have any big sports leagues. Those all kind of wrapped up in January. March is awful weather. February and march are awful in Minneapolis. It's always gross. And wet. And snowy. And who knows what it's going to be. Nothing's really done outside. So I travel a lot. And, we do a headshot promo. Okay. So, last year, was our 43rd year in business, so we did head shots for $43. In honor of that, you will get one outfit, one background, a 15 minute session, a retouched high resolution JPEG with print rights. I'm making like nothing on this. I'm really not making a ton of money at all. Takes me five to 10 minutes to shoot the session. Takes me a couple of minutes to retouch the picture. They pick it out on the back of the camera. And they go. So if I'm not really making that much money, why am I wasting my time doing this? The whole time they're in there, we're also talking about bringing them back in for family stuff. We're talking about other sports leagues that they may have kids involved in. Who do you know that we could talk to at that league? We talk about maybe they have a head shot because their company doesn't provide them with one. So we wanna talk to them about if we could provide this service to the entire company. It's a conversation where what we're doing is genuinely just bringing these people into our studio to show them our products and talk about the other things we can do. Make a little bit of money. Make a little bit. But it's better than sitting around. So this is all constant contact templates. We say if you wanna bring in the whole group, it's $43. We'll add on an extra person for $25. It's cheap. You want to take advantage of this deal. But it ends in March. I don't do discounted head shots in April, May, and June when I'm busy. You pay my price. But what's interesting about this one of all of the promotions that I've ever sent out this is the one I get asked about after the deal's done more than anything else. When I go to school functions, Oh, we got your head shot one. I wasn't able to come in. And they'll still book a regular one. Oh, I'm sorry the promotion ended in March. But you can come on in, and we can do a full, regular session for you. We'd love to do that. We get people off of it. That was a first test to do the head shot one. It went really well. Okay. September. We always push families. Families. Fall family photos. It is all the rage. So, we did $49. 60 minute session. 25 holiday cards. Okay. So we did no prints on this one. Ain't gettin' an eight by 10. None of that stuff. They just get the 25 cards. And the, and the session. Okay. So why did they get 25 cards? Because people think that all they need is 25 cards. And they always buy more. Minimum order of 25. So we always ended up, every single client bought more cards than what was included. But beyond that, we had an incredible upsell rate, where people were buying eight by 10s. Were buying wall portraits. Because our family photos in the fall, it's like, the easiest thing in the world to take a picture that looks amazing if you get those back lit Oaks that are orange and reds. And it's beautiful light. And it's so nice. It's hard for them to say no. It's easy. We go in. We talk about this is the promotion that we're doing. It gives them an ability to book it right now. We do restrict when we're doing these types of sessions. We wanna make it so we are restrictive in the locations. Because we wanna do them back to back to back to back to back to back to back. I do not want to shoot one here, get in my car, drive somewhere else, and do another one. Because the time that I'm spending driving, I could have done a whole nother family session. And I won't work more than, I work nine to five Tuesday through Friday. I work 10 to four on Saturdays. I don't work nights. I don't work Sundays. And I don't bring work home. Ever. So, my window is six hours of work. On Saturday. I wanna do as many as I can in six hours. But after that I'm done. I don't do more. I could. I just think that I refuse to be held by my job like that. I wanna go home. I wanna enjoy my life. God. I got a lot of great friends. I've got a lot of cool people. I wanna hang out with those guys. I don't wanna be stuck working families for 12 hours. 'Cause then I might end up hating family photography. And I don't wanna do that. There's my wife, my dog, and I again. See, ah, your biggest fans. I am your biggest fan. Like us on Facebook. We're pushing for it. Again though, we're pushing the personal touch. We're putting a face to the company. So, across industries that you look at, the 2016, what is considered a successful email marketing campaign is 24.8% open rate. I'm at 38%. So we hit, we hit well on these. And now, this is the analytics from it. I got five people that turned me in for spam. Jerks. We got 89 people off of this one. But it walks you through all the analytics on it. But those are our numbers. So we're getting 27 people to our website. We're getting, actually it's more than that because it's all the variations of it. But we sent 25 people from that email straight to our contact us page. It's cheap. It's affordable. Email marketing. It's not dead. This is the stuff that we're doing. We talked about how photographers never ask for the job. Ask for the job. Tell people what you're doing. Tell people what you want to do for them. Avoid spam. Today. Tomorrow. And, forever. Becoming a spammer, if you happen to become deemed as one, it's awful. Technically speaking, if you are a spam marketer, you could get sued. You could get fines. You could get sanctions. Internet service providers could block your website. They could pull the plug. They could do a bunch of stuff for you. Realistically that's not going to happen to any of you. What is going to happen though, is you're going to put such a negative taste in people's mouths about your business that they just won't use you. Ever. So the problem with spam for photographers is becoming too overbearing. It's way, way, way, way worse than not doing enough. 'Cause then you're actually putting a real negative association to your company as opposed to them just not thinking of you. This concept though, what we're going over, it's so critical that we find a business like, going into this, you need, there's two times in a photography that you're taking pictures or you're selling pictures. Those are the only two times you're making money. You're takin' or sellin'. If you're not doing either one of those things, you aren't making any money. So, why would we not be aware of our interactions with clients however they come up. However we're able to get those interactions. Why would we not be trying to encourage more people to come through our studio? Like, it's really, it's not, it's so obvious. But we need to do it. And I think that some people get uncomfortable with the idea of I don't, I don't wanna sell. I don't wanna be a salesman. You don't have to do a hard pitch. Just let 'em know this is what you do. And become well versed in other genres. I have a friend, who we're talking about knowing how to do more types of photography than just one. I have a friend, Craig LaMere, he's an awesome photographer. Terrible friend. Great photographer. But of all the people in know in this industry, which is quite a few, he's the person that I can truthfully say is most obsessed with learning the craft of photography. I've never met anyone that's more focused on, I want to learn how to do it all. Exceptionally. And there's a lot of people like, and he shoots, he has an established resume. He's got business. He's making money. He shoots stuff. He does practice shoots every week. Because he wants to learn. He went and bought tilt shift lenses. And was shooting businesses. Because he wanted to learn architecture photography. 'Cause that's a normal thing to do with a Friday night. But that's what he does. He's completely obsessed with the craft of photography. And I think that when we're going through all this stuff that's the one thing I want to encourage you guys to do is don't just get so limited in your scope. Learn. Practice. Reach our. Grow. In this industry. So that we aren't becoming stagnant people. Because if you aren't growing, it's dying. Back to the spamming. How do you know when you cross the line and become spammer material? What things have you seen out there. Or any other examples? How would you know? What up Tay Tay. So, they give you reports. Depends on the company that you're gonna use. We use Constant Contact. We've tried Mail Chimp. We've tried a couple of the other ones. We get an, a higher open rate for some reason out of Constant Contact than what we do out of the other ones. How we get these email addresses is on our order forms. People write down that they're consenting to be in it. That's how we would get them to start this process. At the end of the year, I use a company, and we're gonna talk about this company. Get Friday dot com. It's like a virtual assistant service and they hire guys in India that'll work for really, really, really affordable rates. I was obsessed with finding tickets to the Mayweather Pacquiao. And I paid a guy to research all the fight rumors and email me everything twice a day for three months, and it cost me like $4 a day. They do like crazy administrative tasks for really, really affordable rates. I send them pictures of our order forms. Done. That's what it is. They type 'em up. I send 'em pictures of our order forms. And we'll get a typed up spreadsheet. So that's how we import our list. Now people have given us their consent on that form to be part of our marketing. A lot of people will forget that. So what'll happen is we send the first one out, and whenever you add email addresses to your marketing list you're gonna have a bunch of people that are gonna like, write you back and then be like, I hate you. Where did you get my email address from? Take me off this list. I never wanna talk to you again. You'll get a few of those. Every single time. People freak out. But you have to have an unsubscribe button. And you'll see the reports as to why. A lot of times if we get unsubscriptions too it'll be because they moved. And they can say, like, moved to Colorado. You need to just pay attention to the reactions and the feedback through the analytics that you get from the company. And then I think it, I just think it makes sense too. Like three to four times a year. That's not a big deal. I wouldn't get annoyed if a company reached out to me three to four times a year. I would get annoyed if I was getting emails bi-weekly. Like, it would not take me very long to unsubscribe. And that happened to me with, and the other thing that you have to make sure that you do, where I lost it with a company 'cause I clicked unsubscribe. Two weeks later I got another email. I clicked unsubscribe. Two weeks later I got another email. I clicked unsubscribe. Two weeks later I got another email. So I actually called them up. And I said like, I keep clicking unsubscribe. But I keep getting emails from you. Can you please take me off your list? And the guy was like, Nah. You know, sorry, just click unsubscribe. I said no that's not gonna work. Because I keep doing it and you keep emailing me. Can you please take me off your list? And he goes, yeah okay. So he wrote down my email address. And he said you're gonna be taken off our list. I said okay, great. Two weeks later I got an email. So you have to be, I'm not gonna say who it is, but I will never do business with this company. They'll never get a penny out of me. I finally got 'em to take me off the list when I did a little social media shaming. Which is not necessarily the right approach. But it worked. You need to have these Constant Contacts, these Mail Chimps, they have an unsubscribe button. Don't put people's email addresses in if they unsubscribe. Don't put 'em back. They don't care. They don't wanna be on your list. Respect that.