You’re a relatively successful photographer in the editorial, corporate, portrait market, and you’re trying to think of ways of keeping in touch with your customers, keeping you and your work uppermost in their minds. Why not send them all an email newsletter?! Because:
1. It looks like Spam.
Spam is unsolicited email. No ifs, no buts. Have you ever been asked by anyone to please send them a regular email letting them know what you’re up to? Okay, maybe your mother, that time you stayed a little too long on Pi Pi island. Any other time? No.
Spam is absolutely detested by everyone. ‘Everyone’ includes even people who routinely send out lolcats, Madeline posters and motivational ditties. This means that your mass mailing will either get grumbled about, ignored, or caught by increasingly sophisticated spam traps. And you’ll be disliked. This incontrovertible fact alone should be enough to stop you.
2. It tastes like Tofu
A mass mailing that is vaguely targeted, but is still unsolicited, is called Tofu. Examples are people who mass mail members of bona fide, opt-in email lists with something they think might interest them. Free knitting patterns to people on a knitter’s design list is one recent example. Respect Party mailings to peacenik lists is another.
The trouble with Tofu is that it has this vaguely apple-pie veneer that attempts to make you think it’s good for you. It isn’t, it’s still unsolicited email, and will go the same way as Spam. What is worse, getting something you don’t want from someone you dislike, or from someone you’d like to like, but you can’t because they keep giving you something you don’t want? If you’re finding yourself saying, some version of “I haven’t actually asked, but ah, I’m sure they’ll like it..“, you’re sending Tofu.
3. Bandwidth
Let me guess: you’re sending nice quality images, rollover gifs, a variety of flavours of artwork, amusing little animations in your email, aren’t you?
How well do you know your intended audience? Do you know how much bandwidth they’re paying for? Whether their internet supplier has a cut-off cap? If they live in a backwater pit village where the infrastructure makes dial-up their only option? If they receive their emails on a phone or PDA? If they travel a lot and connect over flaky wireless connections with a laptop? Have you ever made a phone call to someone asking them to stop sending you one particular bulky email because it’s blocking all your others? No?
Imagine your postman trying to stuff a hippo through your keyhole whilst falling off your doorstep, and you get the general idea.
4. Client compatibility
An issue linked to 3. How many different email clients are there, how much mailbox space have people got, how many of them use Adobe to open attachments, how many of them have the latest version of Ajax or Flash Player or Quicktime installed, or have ever received a Trojan in a Microsoft Word attachment? You don’t, and can’t possibly, know.
Just imagine the damage to your hard won reputation if unwittingly, you cause an account to be deleted, or horror of horrors, a computer b0rkage. Are you now thinking that people, your customers, should be protecting themselves from any or all of these potential horrors?
Isn’t it easier for them to just protect themselves from you?
5. Visibility vs irritation
The white noise of the internet is still, in itself, a major problem for many people, and especially for career professionals. Emails are the nasty chore of office life, having replaced washing cups and emptying ashtrays as the worst job of the day. The collective ugh of the nation as the Monday morning inboxes are opened can be heard from Swindon to Peterlee. Do you really want your carefully photoshopped creation to be the 100th email that person has deleted this morning?
And if you’re this inconsiderate, do you think you’ll get commissioned, again?
6. Opt in and double opt in
Okay, you’re still not convinced. You want to send an occasional email, maybe only once a year. Use one of the big fully-featured services like Google groups, or Yahoo. Or even better, get a friend with a server to make you a listserv, it isn’t difficult. That way, your contacts can opt-in, and preferably double-opt-in to your email service. Double opt in is when they sign up to a mailing list, then get an email they have to reply to, before the system is activated. It’s an industry standard thing now.
Try recruiting people to your new system, and see how many of them will come over. That’ll give you an idea how many of them really, really want a regular email from you. I can guarantee that it won’t be those important people who get more mail than God. Again, it might be your mother, but you’d take her photo for nothing, right?
7. Opt out
Do you offer an opt-out? Is there an unsubscribe box at the bottom of every email you send out? Do you think there should be?
8. It’s old school
Terribly. Nobody does it now, for all the reasons above, but mostly 1, 2. and the thing about it being inconsiderate. However easy, cheap, quick you think it is, you’ll find it’s similarly quick, cheap and easy for your customers leave you. Unless they are also old school, in which case they’ll think you’re terribly clever until one of your mails breaks something, but in any case, neither you nor they will be reading this.
9. You’ll get ignored
In offices and boardrooms all over the land and oh, abroad, people will cross the real life road to avoid you. They won’t pick up the phone, they won’t meet your eye in the pub, and they won’t ever reply to these emails. If you’ve persuaded any of them to join your Google or Yahoo group, one by one they’ll switch to ‘read on the web’, and they won’t look. Well, they might, once in a while, for a laugh, or maybe to illustrate an article like this.
10. You’ll never know how much your clients are irritated, because you’ll just get killfiled.
This is how to killfile a persistent Tofu or Spam emailer. Thunderbird is similar to most email clients, button names will probably be slightly different:
Tools -> Message Filters -> New -> add details of sender -> Click OK -> Run Now
Takes less than one minute to set up. Of course if you’re using Gmail or similar, you could can just mark all email from this user as Junk, and after the first one or two, your Spamtrap will handle it for you.
If you really are traditional old school, that’s something to be respected. Don’t play about with things you barely understand, be authentic and send a proper letter, or a nice postcard, through Royal Mail, with a First Class stamp. And make a website. It’s very simple. Do it today.
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[...] You’re a relatively successful photographer in the, editorial, corporate, portrait market, and you’re trying to think of ways of keeping in touch with your customers, keeping you and your work uppermost in their minds. Why not send them an email newsletter?! Because…. [...]