Spam A Lot
There’s a lot of talk about email promo’s lately. Here, here, here, here and here. See what I mean. It seems the consensus is email promos aren’t very effective. I think that’s true to an extent. I’ve definitely seen the click through rate on my email promos drop from when i started doing them a few years ago.
Talking with one creative, they said there are days where they will mass delete hundreds of emails in one fell swoop… great and crappy promos judged (or not judged) to be worthy of the same fate. Of course, at the same time I’ve talked to creatives who prefer email promos and mass trash physical promos. This is why, as part of an overall promotion regimen, I think email promos are still worthwhile.
As you can see on some of those links, some photographers like to include a lot of text and stories which seems to work for them. My theory has always been KISS… keep it as simple as possible with as little text as possible. Knowing the creatives are getting a lot of these emails, I figure the last thing they want to do is read. Put up a nice image, let them know what you do, who you are and where you are and they will get the point (isn’t there a saying about a picture being worth something?). If they like your image, they click on through or save you in their favorites list, if they don’t… well, better luck next time.
As I’m typing this my email promos are going out and I’m having a discussion with my friend Emily about the subject line of these email blasts. To me, the most difficult part of the process is coming up with a decent subject line. To date, I think mine have been pretty lame so I need to do something about it. It’s a challenge figuring out how to grab someone’s attention in 50 characters or less and at the same not be too spammy.
How about something like this:
Really, delete all the other emails, this is the only one you need to open!
That’s what we’d like to believe anyway.
-------------------------Written by Jeff Singer - Visit my portfolio website here and buy custom prints here.
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3 Responses to “Spam A Lot”
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I really like your blog and i respect your work. I’ll be a frequent visitor.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeff Singer, Sara Mansfield. Sara Mansfield said: The woes of self promotion…What do you put in your email subject line? RT @jeffsinger New Blog Post: Spam A Lot: http://bit.ly/4g44Nw [...]
[...] However, as I wrote in a previous post, it’s seems as if the love affair of e-mail promos is over. At one point, what seemed like not too long ago, I remember reading how creatives loved e-mail promos over physical mailers… now it seems as if that sentiment has largely gone back the other way. Could things have changes so much in a year? I guess with articles like the one in PDN it’s not hard to believe photographer’s jumped on the band wagon and the amount of e-promo traffic increased to the point of over saturation. I’ve been sending out e-mail promos (or spamming creatives as some would call it) since about 2005 so I can proudly say I was ahead of the curve… not that that means anything. [...]