Expert Advice: Email Marketing

Tuesday May 15th, 2012

by Peter Clark

The world of email marketing is a labyrinth; a never-ending maze of information that you could spend years trying to sift through. When I first started at Wonderful Machine four years ago, I had little knowledge in how to navigate this realm of marketing. Nowadays, after taking charge of sending out all our mass email promotions and creating a multitude of designs for photographers all over the world, I can safely say I have a much better grasp on what works and what doesn’t. And while I’ll admit that I’m no genius when it comes to remembering all the technical mumbo jumbo of email marketing, I can offer you some real world advice from my experiences.

There are dozen of articles out there on email marketing; it’s very easy to get lost in the shuffle—so, I hope that what I’m sharing is seen as a fresh perspective or can serve as a refresher to get you amped up for marketing. Feel free to continue the conversation in the comments with your own successes (and failures). At the end of the article, I’ve provided links to various helpful articles on the subject of email marketing. But first, let’s get down to business:

Crafting the Email

What makes a great email design? That’s a tough question to answer since design (and art in general) is such a subjective subject. Every art buyer and creative, like any person in the world, has their own expectations. However, there are a number of things you can do to make sure your promos will have greater success. When I design email promotions for photographers I’m constantly trying new and interesting ways to showcase their work. Often, the photographer has very minimal branding, usually just a wordmark and one or two colors. It’s my task to take that content and make something interesting out of it. Each scenario is different.

Here are my tips to live by when creating promos:

• Your promo needs a purpose. That means having a call to action! What are you trying to accomplish with your promos? Make it clear to the viewer that they can click the promo and know where they’ll end up and what they’ll find there.
• It’s good practice to have your promos be no more than 600-700 pixels in width so they appear correctly in most email clients. The user should have the option to view the email online, but from experience, most users generally don’t take the extra step to this so make sure it looks right in the email reader. Smaller width promos will also show up larger on mobile phones and tablets than a super wide promo.
• Figure out what type of promo you want to send. There are a number of common layouts photographers are using, from one large image to newsletter style.
• Make sure you’re branding your promos to match all of your other marketing materials. Everything from the color palette to the overall feel of the promo should reflect what’s being shown on your website and your printed portfolio book.
• If your copy can be html text, make it so. I realize you want to stick to your branding as much as possible with nice looking typefaces, but having everything be an image will limit what a lot of users see at first glance (when being prompted to view images) or worse, being allocated to the spam folder.
• Keep copy short, but interesting. Let your images do most of the talking–they should speak for themselves. A creative will know good work when they see it.
• Have someone help you edit your image selection. Always get another set of eyes.
• If you custom code your email promo, make sure all the images contained within HTML are pointing to a specific URL on the web (ie. http://www.wonderfulmachine.com/images/emailer/this_image_rules.jpg”). Otherwise they will show up blank when sending it out.
• Test your promos in a couple different email clients before sending out. Some email marketing services have software that lets you do this easily. I tend to test promos in at least G-mail and Mac Mail. Every company you’re sending emails to is setup differently so it’s best to test, test, test. You don’t want your images and copy having strange gaps or other errors, it’ll come off as amateurish and rushed.
• Don’t include video files. That only works in a handful of email clients. Instead, create animated gifs in Photoshop. File size may get fairly large if you have lots of frames to animate (over 1mb) but it’s your best bet.
• Don’t bore the creative with similar content every time you contact them.
• Commision a well designed, easily updateable html template (or email software). This will make sending out new promos a breeze.

Reaching Your Audience

• Decide what type of email marketing platform you want to use (e.g. Agency Access, MailChimp, MyEmma, Direct Mail (software). Every service has their differences in what they can offer, so do some research. You need to ask yourself questions like: do you want to pay for email credits or do you want to send out emails through your web host’s email server? Or, how important is it to have quality email templates to use if I can’t pay for a designer?
• Make sure all your emails have an opt-out link (usually standard on most email marketing services). It needs to also contain a legitimate physical address in the footer to comply with spam laws.
• Build a custom, targeted list of clients; hopefully no more than 1,000-2,000 creatives per list.
• Have your subject lines be relevant and to the point. I would suggest listing your name/business, what you shoot, and your location all in one sentence so the buyer has a clear idea of what they’re going to look at before even opening the email. (e.g. Latest Lifestyle from Philadelphia photographer John Smith). This also makes it easy for creatives to search and find your promos again later. Being funny and cleaver couldn’t hurt either. Try to switch up the subject line a bit each time to see what works and what doesn’t.
• Don’t expect open rates to be a really large percentage. If you’re getting open rates around 20-30% then you’re doing pretty well. Your rates will also depend on the type of list you’re sending to and how targeted it is. Don’t expect a list of travel specific clients to open your fine art photography work. Know your audience and don’t send emails blindly.
• Depending on how you obtain your email list, it will determine what service you can send promos out through. If you bought a list, most email marketing sites like Mail Chimp, won’t let you use their service since you’re using third-party contacts, which goes against their policies. Sites look those will make you obtain lists yourself through email signup options via your website or other methods.
• Start to build a list of personal contacts you’ve worked with in the past and go from there. You’re more likely to get better results from clients you’ve contacted in the past in some way and have opted in to your emails. However, it never hurts to take a chance since you never know what a creative needs at that exact moment.
• Track your results and follow up with phone calls or other promotional materials. See how many opens and clicks you’re getting and what types of clients are paying attention and keep them interested. If your open rates aren’t very successful over a period of time, try switching things up or sending promos out on a different day and time.
• Email promos should not be your only way to reach out to clients on a weekly basis. It’s only one small piece in a much larger puzzle. Start a blog, get on social networking sites, enter contests, set up meetings—get your name out there!

I hope these points are a helpful checklist to look back on when creating your next campaign. I’d now like to briefly highlight a few promos I think work well in the areas I just went over:

Kathryn Russell / Los Angeles
Katheryn’s promo has a calm vibe to it with the subtle color palette, typeface choices, and overall image selection and layout.

Scanderbeg Sauer / Switzerland
These guys send out a fairly long newsletter-type promo that summarizes their latest shoots, with links back to their blog (news) and portfolio site. The design is fairly basic, but it matches their website and it gets the job done. What I really like is the short paragraph description of each shoot–I love reading about the back stories on images. Also, the html text is good to tell email servers that this isn’t spam. And having amazing work doesn’t hurt either.

Laura Flippen / San Francisco
Laura’s work is unique in that everything she shoots seems to work really well together as a group of images—be it a landscape, still life, or portrait. I’ve received a few promos from her and this grid of images is a nice change from the standard of just showing one or two shots. Showcasing this many images together gives the creative a good sense of what she’s capable of at a quick glance. It’s a simple design, but it looks great. The branding also matches her portfolio site. It might be nice to include a brief description to get the creative even more interested in the work.

Clara Tuma / Switzerland
Clara’s emailers do a nice job of always being centered around a certain specialty or project she shot and making sure the color palette compliments the series of photos. The promos have an appealing feminine allure.

Here are some additional resources to delve deeper into the world of email marketing:

• Photoshelter’s Guide to Email Marketing
• MailChimp’s Email Guides (tons of articles)
• Campaign Monitor
• The Lab – Agency Access’s Blog
• Adbase’s Blog

If you’re a photographer interested in Wonderful Machine’s consulting services, find out more on our consulting page.

The Clash!

Tuesday May 15th, 2012

Sometimes you just have to learn more. When Australia-based Alex Weltlinger‘s series “The Clash!” hit my screen, I knew it was one of those times. I immediately wrote to Alex asking for more information—background, inspiration, etc—and he replied with the story behind his dark fairy tale photos. I’ll let him take it from here:

Snow White's Lair

The Clash!

The concept of “The Clash!” series is a little tricky to explain as it’s intrinsically tied up with the story of how the project came to be. Bear with me, this is a tad convoluted…

About three and a half years ago I met artist, illustrator and fashion designer Lang Leav (aka Akina), known for her quirky and slightly sinister style of depicting fairy tale characters. Both being fans of storybook imagery, we immediately clicked creatively and wanted to collaborate. However, a year went by and nothing happened—we were both busy, caught up with our freelance careers. Eventually, Lang collaborated with one of her friends, milliner Sivear Ung, to produce these amazing little head pieces based on her character Liliput.

When I found out about the head pieces, I flipped out. I got back in contact with Lang and the 3 of us – Lang, Siv and myself – decided to meet up in person to plan something out. We started talking about Lang’s other characters and how we could build a story around them, eventually settling on the good Liliput and the evil Snow White (who also had a nifty head piece designed and made by Siv). But at that meeting, something unexpected happened – I got this vision of an almighty clash between Liliput and Snow White stuck in my head. I never could shake that – it set tone for the entire project, became the crux point of the story and was eventually realized in the image the series is named for—the Clash!

At that point we discovered hopelessly ourselves outclassed and needed a production designer to take our scattered thoughts and translate them to a physical reality. So I got into contact with my friend Pia Leong, a wonderful production designer who I’d worked with before. Over the next few weeks, the four of us bounced ideas around as we built a story that would culminate in this titanic clash…

And then Pia started sketching.

Snow White's Lair Concept Sketch by Pia Leong

Pia’s sketches were…galvanizing. Seeing those, we were all suddenly inspired, and fearful, for the project had grown a whole lot larger. Yet we stuck with it, determined not to compromise and realize our total vision, in the process becoming by far the biggest photographic project I’d ever helmed. The total weight of everyone’s expectations was on my shoulders, a burden tricky to bear. However, I also had sheer bloodymindedness on my side, so I just buried my self doubt and got on with it.

So, after all that, what was the concept?

Well, the story posits the existence of two powerful, but opposing characters. Snow White is a twisted version of her traditional self—an evil witch with echoes of Mrs. Havisham who broods in her lair and reflects on her days of glory. Liliput, on the other hand, is a traveling mage—an archetypal good witch who wanders the woodlands with her animal companions. Liliput passes the lair, and Snow White, being greedy, decides to abduct one of her animal companions to lock on display in a cage. Liliput discovers this treachery and enacts marvelous revenge, imprisoning Snow White in that same cage to meditate on her failure.

The Abduction

All in all, it took nearly three months full time preproduction to make it happen. We built two huge sets and shot over two very long days. And the initial post production with retoucher Abbie Muntz took nearly nine months—as by necessity we had to work on this in our off time.

Photo by Nelson Lai

About ten months later, Frances Keevil Gallery offered me an exhibition in association with Head On Photo Festival (the largest photographic festival in Australia). However, the six original images delivered by Abbie simply weren’t enough. So I revisited the entire shoot with Frances Keevil and together we pulled out another four images from the production. With Abbie unavailable, I asked my friend Samantha Hawken to retouch the final four, something she did a magnificent job on.

The normal response I get to the images is “Wow. You’re mad.” Which is quite true. But I’m also proud of the fact that before they say that, the images tend to stop people in their tracks… Unlike the rest of my personal work, there was never any attempt to embed deeper themes within the series, nor try and illuminate any aspect of humanity. This was pure fantasy—a whimsical flight into the imagination, subtly ridiculous and ideally something that would engage with the 5 year old in all of us, gazing upwards with pure wonder in our eyes… I hope that is the result.

The Moth Prances

“The Clash!” opens today at the Frances Keevil Galley. The show runs May 15-27. Be sure to check it out along with Alex’s website, alexweltlinger.com.

- Maria Luci

ONEderful

Monday May 14th, 2012

In my opinion, Cade Martin and Design Army should team up more often. Every time they get together, they create something uniquely wonderful; usually imagery that’s both whimsical and romantic, like their memorable campaigns for Neenah Paper and The Washington Ballet. Their most recent project was no different—a fanciful collaboration for The One Club.

Each year The One Club—an organization that “seeks to celebrate the legacy of creative advertising”—produces the prestigious international advertising competition, The One Show. For this year’s competition, The One Club came to Design Army to promote their call for entries to ad creatives across the globe.

For the campaign, Design Army knew they needed stand out imagery to catch the eye of fellow creatives, so they called up Cade to help bring their “ONEderful” theme to life. The “ONEderful” world consisted of adorable furry creatures, smiling flowers, fluffy clouds and one man with flaming red hair. Cade spent weeks furiously planning the production, making sure every little detail was in place before their Saturday and Sunday shoot dates. This included numerous visits to taxidermy shops to collect the menagerie needed. It finally seemed as if everything was in place but the universe had other plans; just days before the shoot an earthquake hit the east coast, followed right up by a hurricane.

The earthquake took out Cade’s location. Then, the night before the shoot, the hurricane took their talent. Their model—the one who they’d specifically had wardrobe and a wig fitted for—couldn’t make it to DC. He refused to travel by train during a hurricane. So, Cade and his team scrambled. They found a new location and ended up using Seth Callaway, aOne Show producer, as their model—mostly because he was the only one who fit in the clothing. However, according to Cade, this turn of events actually worked out quite well,

Seth was amazing. He has a great face and so much energy. He’s so expressive. I don’t think the model could have taken it in the direction he took it.

But the universe wasn’t done yet, the hurricane ended up also taking out the studio’s power and Cade’s massive movie studio lights were in need of some serious juice. Fortunately, Cade had a generator and they were able to keep going, overcoming each problem as they arose. “Every single aspect of this shoot was adapt and overcome,” says Cade, “you gotta kind of roll with the punches.”

The final photographs—all composed in camera—were shared by The One Show through posters sent out to 35,000 creatives in over 60 countries. They were also used in banners on sites like Creativity, Campaign and Design Taxi, and in magazine ads. The images are truly ONEderful; which is maybe what the universe intended all along.

Vew more of Cade’s work on his website, cademartin.com.

- Maria Luci