Hey photographers! Welcome back to our Photography Blog, Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah! Today we’re going to share five reasons why your wedding or portrait business needs a strong set of photography email templates! We know that email templates for photographers can make a big difference in your life and in your photography business, just like they have in ours!

 

 

What are Photography Email Templates?

Briefly at the start of this blog, we want to make sure that we’re all on the same page when we talk about what photography email templates are. Generally speaking, email templates for your wedding photography or portrait photography business are just what they sound like: pre-written responses to common emails that you send.

 

And these don’t have to be anything fancy, or something specific to any kind of software. We use Honeybook to keep track of all of our client communication and store our 70+ email templates. But email templates can be as simple as a list of messages saved in a word document on your computer, or in the drafts folder of your Gmail account.

 

You can obviously write your own email templates. If you want to do this, we recommend paying attention to each and every email you send. If you feel like you’ve sent a similar one before, or will likely send a similar email again, then it might make sense to save a version of it as a template. However, building up a robust suite of photography email templates — and making sure they’re both well-written, and also effective at communicating whatever point you’re trying to get across — that can take a lot of time and energy. That’s why many photographers will choose to buy a pre-written set of email templates, like the templates we’re going to share more about at the bottom of this blog.

 

 

Reason #1: Photography Email Templates Save You Time

But let’s get into our 5 reasons why a wedding photography business or a portrait photography business should invest in email templates. The first and most important reason is that photography email templates save you time. One of the biggest complaints we hear from our students who are a couple of years into running their businesses is how much time they spend on client communications. It’s a common misconception that running a photography business is going to be 80% taking beautiful photos, and 20% running a business. In fact, our experience has been almost the exact opposite: we spend about 20% of any given year taking photos, and 80% running our business!

 

But that doesn’t mean you have to waste time writing and re-writing the same emails over and over again! Although we send and receive thousands of emails for our business each year, the vast majority of those emails can be replaced by just a few dozen email templates.

 

Over the last 5 years, we’ve gotten well over 1,000 leads for our wedding photography services, not to mention more portrait leads than we could possibly count. If we had taken 5-7 minutes to write up a response from scratch to each of those emails, that would add up to a full 48-hours of email time each year just responding to leads. Instead, we pull up a template, customize a few small details, and have a response out in 30 seconds or less. This saves us dozens of hours each year! And that’s just for responding to leads, without even mentioning all the emails we send back and forth with clients who have already booked with us.

 

 

Reason #2: Templates Allow You to Respond More Quickly

And here’s the thing about turning that 5-7 minutes of typing into a 30 second email template. It means you can respond to new leads more quickly! Before we started using email templates, we might see a lead pop up on our phone and think, “Huh, that looks like a great lead! When we get home, we should check our calendar to see if we’re available, then look at what our pricing might be for that kind of job, then write up an email response.”

 

Because that felt like way too much work to do on our tiny phone screens, especially if we were out to dinner or with friends, we’d wait a few hours, and respond to that lead once we got home. But email templates changed all of that.

 

Now, after a quick check of our calendar, we can pull up our inquiry-response email template — one that we’ve designed and tweaked little by little, year after year, to maximize the number of responses we get — and send it off in seconds. So it isn’t just that 5 minutes became 30 seconds with email templates. When we’re out of the office, we just narrowed several hours down to under a minute! And we probably don’t have to tell you that the more quickly you respond to an interested lead, the more likely you are to book that job.

 

 

Reason #3: Templates Help You Stick to Your Convictions

Here’s the third benefit of photography email templates that you may not have thought about. Templates help you stick to your convictions! Here’s what we mean. If you decided while you were writing your email templates (or modifying ones that you bought online) that you were going to charge a certain amount for a certain kind of job, you won’t be as tempted to budge on your pricing in the moment, just because someone emailed you.

 

Here’s an example. If you’ve been to our workshop on the Wedding Photography Consultation Call, you know that we recommend giving interested leads a starting price, but holding your full pricing information for that sales call. But if someone emails you and asks you to send over your packages, you’re more likely to hold to your pre-determined workflow (which you know is better for you) if you have a template already written that explains that!

 

We even have a pre-written template for when couples reach out to us with a budget that’s well below what we charge, or when they request an engagement session at a popular local location that we know makes for really rough photoshoots. These are things that we decided in advance we will or won’t do. And email templates help us stay true to those decisions!

 

 

Reason #4: Good Templates Help You Make More Money

For all of these reasons we’ve discussed, good email templates help your photography business make more money. When you add up quicker response times to qualified leads, and sticking to your pricing… it can begins to add up to more profit for your business! Not to mention — with professionally-written email templates, every single interaction with your clients and your leads is more likely to wow them, which can increase 5-star reviews and word-of-mouth referrals.

 

In addition to this, think back to the very first reason we gave for email templates: that they save you time. What could you do with an extra hour each week? Especially for photographers who are trying to run their businesses while also working another job or while being a full-time caretaker, even just one extra hour each week can have a huge impact.

 

Maybe you’ll use that extra time to update your website more frequently, meaning your best imagery is always on display for interested clients. Maybe you’ll use that time to invest in yourself and take one of our workshops, helping you grow your business more quickly because of your improved workflow or pricing or sales. Or maybe you don’t even want to make more money. Maybe that extra time can be spent with your loved ones or on your hobbies or traveling. And we all know that you can’t even place a price tag on that kind of time.

 

That’s why — even if you spend $500 on high-quality email templates — they’d be a good investment. Once you pull that lever and buy a suite of email templates — or invest the few dozen hours to write your own — it will pay dividends in the form of more time and business income for the rest of your time as a photographer.

 

 

Reason #5: Our Photography Email Templates are For Sale Right Now!

Here’s the 5th reason why you should consider upgrading your photographer business and investing in email templates: we’re selling our photography email templates right now!

 

We just announced our newest photography business workshop a couple of weeks ago, all about building a workflow for your wedding or portrait business that’s both pleasant for your clients, but also efficient and effective for you. And as part of that workshop, we’ve also decided to sell our email templates for the first time! We developed this suite of 70+ email templates over the last 6 years. Any email that we found ourselves sending more than once, we turned into a template. And we’ve created countless tweaks and variations of the years. These are the exact email templates that we use to run our photography business, and bring in over $200,000 per year.

 

And these templates cover everything. How we respond to leads and encourage couples to take the next step. Our unique response to every different kind of portrait lead. How we onboard new clients who have decided to book with us. Our email preparing our portrait clients for their sessions with us. And SO much more!

 

Whether you also use a software like Honeybook to manage your business, or just communicate with your clients through simple email, these templates are ready to use from the moment you download them.
We’ve even added a small note to each and every template. That way, you know when to use each one, how you should customize them for your own business, and how to get the most out of the entire suite of emails!
So use this link to learn more about our email templates.

 

Our Full Workflow Bundle

You can also pick up our email templates at a big discount as a part of the full Workflow Workshop Bundle. The bundle includes our latest two-hour for-photographers workshop: Our Wedding Photography Workflow: How to Build a Pleasant and Efficient Client Experience, from Inquiry to 5-Star Review.

 

In addition, you can get our full suite of 70+ email templates, our pre-wedding questionnaire, and our client workflow tracker! And you can save more than $100 while you’re at it!

 

 

Click here to check out our Workflow Bundle!