Email Marketing: Blasts From The Past

I used to be an Email Blaster. I loved the immediacy of the process, the instant gratification, the low cost and, especially, the statistical data that was immediately available. Hits, Visits, Opens, Click Throughs, Page Views, Unique, New, Returning …. What a great new language! It was like speaking Vulcan with Mr Spock – and Captain Kirk having no idea what you’re talking about. Plus, all that information at my fingertips. Cool. After hitting that first campaign’s ‘send now’ button, I was addicted. So easy and effective – I had become a true email junkie. I needed my fix all the time. I even started to rob time from other more important tasks (like having lunch) to check my stats.

That was more than two years ago. I don’t do large email blasts any more. I have been in recovery ever since. I’ve almost fallen off the wagon once or twice, but that is to be expected when you have no support group. I am kind of on an island, battling this addiction by myself. It will be hard, but I don’t think I will ever go back.

And why should I? The real value, which was in recipients clicking all the way through to a directed website, had fallen precipitously from 7-8% to less than half a percent. And who could blame people for not paying attention anymore? Not only did they have to deal with an in-box full of solicitation emails announcing ‘new work from photographer xyz’ or ‘new project from photographer xyz’, but for a large portion of the people receiving those emails, ‘photographer xyz’ had little or nothing to do with their creative needs. They were (and are) automotive art buyers receiving news about fashion photographers, or fashion buyers receiving automotive links. They were location buyers receiving beauty updates or lifestyle producers receiving details about a new liquid campaign. And if enough of those messages are consistently irrelevant or extraneous, it’s enough to make even the most cordial art producer weary.

The typical art buyer at a large agency today receives more than 50 email promos a day. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, that’s approximately 1000 a month. Yikes! And that’s just email promos – not to mention the hundreds of more urgent, project-related and internal emails they get. Plus, the fact that they are busier and wearing more hats than ever these days, where do you think viewing the email promo lands on the priority list? Probably not very high. I heard one Art Buyer on a podcast recently say that, if she took the time to read every email promo she received, in a year she would spend “over 180 hours - almost 5 weeks” reading them all. Really? Can you blame them for their digital fatigue? In fact, over half the contacts in the most popular industry databases have opted out, so there’s a good chance these email blasts are not even reaching the top people!

Today, we prefer smaller, more targeted email campaigns. They are handwritten, and personalized in the subject line. There is usually a call to action, like an appointment or a reference to a specific client, or mention of a previous meeting or conversation. We try to make sure the imagery and genre of photography is a good fit for everyone we send to. We do our research. It is a very labor intensive project, but at least we feel good about our efforts to target the right people. We’re not perfect, but the determination to get it right is there. Even if it is a general newsletter campaign, it only goes to contacts that we know are relevant to the work.

As a rep, I understand that keeping current on emerging and existing talent is one of the many tasks of an art buyer or producer. And I know that most of them enjoy researching new artists or new work, when they have the time. But I also think it is our job as photographers, illustrators, agents, and marketers, to do a better job of analysis, market research and segmentation. The information is there for us to do a better job of getting to know and understand who our customers are, what they want, and how to break through the clutter. It’s called homework. Large email blasts are the lazy way of doing homework – and that’s coming from someone who survived on Cliffs Notes.

If you’re still sending out 6000 identical emails to a master list of art buyers, creative directors, photo editors, print producers, graphic designers and art directors, you might as well stand on a street corner in Spokane with a bullhorn shouting, “New Work From Photographer XYZ Here”. Just my opinion. Anyone interested in starting an Emailers Anonymous support group?

M&P