E-Promos, We Loved You So

Not to beat a dead horse, but I was sitting in my studio last week waiting for a client to arrive for a shoot and I picked up what turned out to be a issue of PDN from a year ago.  In this issue, the December 2008 issue, there was an article about email promos.  The article was about Photographer Miles Keep, who stopped all printed promos and only sends out email promos.

The obvious comment by Miles was that the email promos are cheaper and “it’s simple, you click and you’re there.”  Keep goes on to say, “The key to e-mail is you send them out and a day later I can see who’s looked at my e-mail and who hasn’t.  I can see who’s looked at them and gone to my web site;  those are the people you want to follow up on.”  (I will mention, I have read how a lot of the creatives who receive e-promos find it very creepy that someone may be tracking them via e-mail promo analytics).

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.

I wonder if Miles is still getting the same high click through rates as he was a year ago (according to the article it was about 90 click throughs for every 2000 e-mails).  I wonder of he’s still skipping the physical promos.  I’ve sent him an email asking, so I’ll post and update if I hear back.

As for me.  I’m still pumping out the email promos.  But, this year I’m actually going to be increasing my physical promo output.  E-mail promos will never go away (sorry AB’s and PE’s) but as with most things in life, moderation is a good policy… and diversity.