Increase your profits with automated sales campaigns.
February 7th, 2025
You know marketing is good for your business, but sometimes adding one more thing to your to-do list is the final straw on your battle with overwhelm. But what if seasonal marketing campaigns didn’t require months of planning and design? With Automated Client Marketing Campaigns, you can enjoy the boost to your income and only invest a few minutes of your time.
What is a Client Marketing Campaign?
Automated campaigns are ready-to-go marketing tools available to Zenfolio members on ProSuite and PortfolioPlus. All automated marketing campaigns will send emails directly to clients and visitors with whom you’ve shared a gallery. Campaigns also include optional gallery banners, and the ability to customize the discount, email frequency, and content of the emails. Whether you customize a campaign or simply enroll, this helpful tool will save you time and increase sales.
Campaigns are available to enroll in all at once or individually. When enrolled in a Zenfolio Client Marketing Campaign, our system creates a coupon code within your account and distributes it to your clients on your behalf via email on key occasions and holidays. The result is an uptick in your print and product sales for those occasions and throughout the year–and leaving you to celebrate and bask in the glow of taking steps to simplify part of your photography business. Even better? It’s completely free to join for all ProSuite and PortfolioPlus plan members.
Enroll in an automated campaign.
Enrolling in a campaign only takes a few minutes. First, sign into your Zenfolio account–in ProSuite and PortfolioPlus plans, you can locate and opt-in to Automated Campaigns via the Selling widget on your dashboard, then clicking on the Coupons & Campaigns section. On the page, go to Automated Campaigns click the “Setup a Campaign” button and click enroll to opt into the campaigns of your choice.
Here’s an important tip: You must enroll in these Client Marketing Campaigns before the set deadline to enjoy their benefits. Once a deadline for enrollment has passed, you will not be able to enroll in that campaign, although you can still create your own coupon to offer to clients. If you want to set yourself up for additional income throughout the year, you can also check the box for “Enroll me in all campaigns.”
Even if enrolling in every campaign doesn’t fit your business and clients, we recommend reviewing the options and enrolling in each campaign you’d like to join all at once–deadlines have a way of creeping up on you!
Next, it’s time to double check older galleries to make sure all galleries–and your website–are ready for clients and visitors to shop.
Update your photography website.
The last thing you want is for clients to get an invite to a sale and then have them arrive at an expired gallery, unable to purchase prints and products. If you use gallery expiration dates to help motivate clients, you can avoid this potential issue and make the most of your marketing campaigns. Simply unlock and reactivate expired client galleries from the last year–or the last several years–for the duration of the sale.
This is a perfect opportunity to pull in additional sales from all the galleries you’ve delivered throughout the year(s). Just like us, our clients get busy and forget to order that extra set of prints for Auntie Viv. The email in the automated campaign will remind them how much they love their images and then the discount will serve as extra motivation to get that order in quickly.
Turn your images into income.
Sell your photos online from your own custom store. Set up is quick and your clients will enjoy a seamless shopping experience.
Marketing campaigns are designed to drive traffic to your site. If you haven’t done any updates to yours in the last 3-6 months, we recommend taking a few minutes to make sure that this extra traffic is directed to a beautiful, well-organized, and on-brand website that shows off your best and most recent work.
Most photographers fall into one of two categories: we either wait until the slow season and invest a lot of time into making changes across most of our website, or we add a photo or two here and there after every session or so.
Whichever camp you’re in, don’t think of this as a site-wide overhaul–but do set aside about 30 minutes to double check your homepage, services or selling pages, and any portfolios you haven’t updated in a while. If you have a services and booking page, make sure pricing is current and all services you’re currently offering are visible.
We’ll help you keep the site refresh quick by focusing on the following three parts of your site:
1. Update your portfolio.
Set aside the first 10 minutes for updating your homepage and galleries. You probably have your latest work uploaded to your portfolio website already, either for sharing with clients or to offer for sale in your fine art galleries. If you haven’t included any of these images on your homepage yet, select 4 or 5 of your most eye-catching recent favorites, then add them to your homepage hero image block or homepage gallery block.
If you have more than 30 images in your hero block, we recommend removing a few that have been there a while or no longer represent your very best and most recent work and cutting it down to 30 or less. Attention spans–and therefore page views–are short, so make an impact with a less-is-more approach and keep it curated.
With your remaining time, click over to your portfolio and/or shop gallery pages and add a few recent images to their most relevant gallery page as well.
2. Review your price lists.
In the next 10 minutes, take a look through your price lists. With a campaign designed to help you make more money, you want to make sure you’ll still be making a profit after the discount is applied. Reviewing your prices will also ensure that your prices are still competitive. Check your profits and prices on all items to confirm that you’ll still be making money on client orders–the key here is finding a good balance between customer appeal and profitability.
While you are in your price lists, take a few minutes to review the product offerings. Some holidays are particularly good times for selling photo gifts like mugs and keychains, or you may want to include holiday card options, canvases, or framed and matted prints to help increase your profit per order.
Pro tip: Only add products that are a good fit for your type of photography so you don’t overwhelm your clients with options. Decision-paralysis is NOT your friend.
Most of the products listed are available through Zenfolio integrated vendors. They handle the processing and shipping for you, so adding more products to your price lists won’t create any extra work on your end. Self-fulfilled products are also an option for photographers who want to offer a custom item not already included in our integrated vendor options.
3. Visit your website like a client.
Lastly, take about 5 minutes and look through your site as a new client might–enlist a friend or family member for fresh eyes if possible. Click and scan each page on your site checking for any dead links or outdated information on your site menu and pages. Update or remove these issues for the best site experience.
While you are vetting your site content, double-check your contact information; be sure it is up to date and easily accessible. Clients may have questions, and having the correct contact info ensures they can contact you without navigating away from your site.
Launching a well-run marketing campaign is a great way to bring back and engage clients who have previously navigated away from your site without making a purchase. We all get distracted by our day-to-day lives–let the campaign email do some of the client follow-up for you, so they can get back to ordering their favorite images from your site!
It also motivates those who have previously bought from you to get the additional items they were considering but couldn’t quite afford at the time. With a little fine-tuning to your site, you can continue to leverage this automated feature year after year, to attract more sales during lucrative holidays and celebrations.
