In our previous post on How to Use Email Marketing in Your Photography Business, we established the value of cultivating an email list and utilizing email marketing for your professional photography business. Email is personal, inexpensive, and effective. But what if your list of subscribers has been stagnant for some time? We mentioned having a sign-up option with an incentive on your website and collecting email addresses from potential clients in-person, but what if you’re ready to step up your email marketing game? That’s where the StickyAlbums Promotions feature comes into play.
Since the beginning, StickyAlbums have been used to increase referrals by word-of-mouth marketing. With options to contact you from within the app and links to your website and social media pages, StickyAlbums act as both digital photo albums for your clients and mobile business cards for your business. While you should absolutely be collecting email addresses from those who connect with you through the apps, we’ve taken your options for building your email list to the next level with the addition of the Promotions feature. Promotions allow you to collect potential clients’ email addresses from within the app!
Creating Your First Promotion
Building a promotion is simple–it shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to create your first one! To begin, log into your account and select the “Promotions” tab.
After selecting the tab, you’ll see a blue button–”Create A New Promotion.” Click to get started!
The first thing you will do is create a name for a promotion and decide how often you would like it to appear. The “Number of Swipes” you enter will be the number of times an album’s viewer will swipe within the app (in the same viewing) for your promotion to appear. You can activate or deactivate the promotion from here.
Next, you will input the details for your promotion. As you can see in the image below, you will choose a headline and description. Click here to view sample wording for promotions. You may choose to collect the person’s first and last name, email address, and/or phone number. For email marketing purposes, you will always want to be collecting that valuable email address! On this screen, you can also choose the submit button and thank you text.
As we mentioned in last week’s post, offering an incentive for subscribing to your email newsletter list can be a great way to increase the number of people who choose to sign up. We’ve made it simple for you to offer an incentive in PDF or JPG format to all new sign-ups! You can drag and drop the file and anyone who provides an email address will automatically receive the file by email.
Examples of incentives you may choose to offer:
- Coupon for a discount on session fee or print order
- Entry in a giveaway
- What to wear guide for photo sessions (click for a boudoir sample)
- List of local wedding vendors
- Guide to interviewing and hiring a professional photographer
- StickyAlbum of coupons to local businesses (coupon books are a great way to have multiple sources circulating your info!)
Once you’ve built your promotion, you can choose which of your albums to apply it to. You can apply a promotion to as many albums as you would like, but each album can only have one promotion active.
Viewing Your Promotions’ Leads
As you can see, it’s easy to create and update a promotion! It’s equally simple to view your promotion’s leads and export them. When under the “Promotions” tab, select “view” next to the promotion you would like to see leads for.
Viewing the promotion will allow you to see the current details, such as the headline, description, etc. that you selected when creating it. It will also allow you to view the promotion’s subscribers.
You will be able to view the information collected from each subscriber, which album they subscribed through, and the date of their subscription. You can export this list as a CSV file, which will allow you to import the contacts to an email service such as Mailchimp or to save them in a spreadsheet format. The email services will automatically disregard duplicate addresses, so you can export the list and import it to the service as is each time you update.
Following up with Leads
As we mentioned last week, growing an email list is useless if your subscribers never hear from you! Each person who provides an email through a promotion should be added to your email newsletter list and to any autoresponder list you may have for new sign-ups. On top of adding them to these lists, consider making a personal contact by phone or email. Going the extra mile may be what lands you the client! Thank them for their sign-up and offer to schedule a free portrait session consultation over coffee the next time they need a photographer (it’s hard to turn down free coffee!).
Sending regular emails that provide value to your subscribers is important, but equally important is not sending too many. If you begin to send daily emails, expect to have a large number of subscribers jump ship. We suggest sending no more than one email per week, with one email every other week to one email per month being a safer number to maintain your subscribers. You should expect to lose a few subscribers here and there over time, but if you continue providing high-quality newsletters with your target client in mind, you’ll keep the right ones around! Effectively utilizing the Promotions feature will allow you to continuously grow the list and reach new potential clients with each email.
Our customers often think of brilliant marketing solutions using StickyAlbums that we’ve never even considered! If you’re currently using the Promotions feature in a unique way, we’d love to hear about it! You can submit your idea to support@stickyalbums.com or post it in the StickyAlbums User Group on Facebook–we love to share new ways of using StickyAlbums and the features with our customers.