Next to your camera, your e-mail list is your most valuable business asset. It connects you with the group of people most likely to need your services.

Before e-mail, your customer list was was the best marketing tool you had. But your e-mail list can contain:

1. Past customers
2. Friends and family
3. Folks you’ve met in person
4. Referrals from clients
5. People who visit your website (or Facebook page, or Twitter)

Notice how as you move from 1 to 5 you move from customers most likely to purchase from you to least likely (the marketing jargon for this is concentric circles of influence). When mailings were expensive, your tendency was to focus on marketing to the first group only. But with e-mail, you can market to all five for only pennies apiece.

So how do you get e-mail addresses from each of these groups?

1. Past customers - If you’ve been in business for a while, chances are you only have e-mail addresses for a small percentage of your old clients. If you typically contact them by post card, when you send the next one offer them a free gift if they go to your website and “register”, i.e. give you their e-mail address. the gift could be a coupon, a limited edition print, or a PDF booklet you’ve written called “My top 10 tips for taking great snapshots.” It should have a high enough perceived value to get them to give up their e-mail address.

2. Friends and family - This one is easy. export your personal and business e-mail lists into your customer list.

3. Folks you’ve met in person - Always carry business cards. When you meet someone, offer them a card. If they give you one back, add them to your e-mail list. If they don’t have a card, ask for their e-mail anyway.

4. Referrals from clients - I wrote a post about referrals here, but the idea is that if you don’t get them to book a session, at least get their e-mail address.

5. People who visit your website - To get these folks you should have a contact and sign-up form available from every page on your website. If you don’t have this, the next post will explain the tools that I recommend to use.

Tags: e-mail marketing

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 9:50 pm and is filed under marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.