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Grow Your Photography Email List

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to reach your customers, and your Photography business will only grow with a healthy email list. A full-to-bursting Photography email list will enable you to market your products directly to prospective customers and build stronger customer relationships. But creating a large list and utilizing it can sometimes cause difficulties, which is where we come in!

We’ve created the Sell Media plugin that enables photographers and other creatives to sell their work online. With the Sell Media MailChimp extension, customers can be added to your mailing list right from the checkout screen.

In this post, we’ll explain why MailChimp is our email marketing solution of choice, then run through how to install and set up the Sell Media MailChimp extension – enabling you to passively grow your mailing list every time you make a sale.

Why a Photography Email List Matters

Creating and curating your email list is essential for a business. There are so many distractions that promise customer interaction and so few that deliver. Email marketing is still essential for every business, whether just starting out or established. Email is still ranked as the most effective way to inform and alert customers, generate leads and conversions and keep in touch with your central audience. Research also shows that people who are consume large amounts of social media are actually encouraged to check their emails more often, which means that no matter what your audience is doing, email is still the best way to reach your followers.

So let’s start at the beginning:

What Is MailChimp?

The MailChimp homepage

MailChimp is an email marketing solution that’s used by millions of people to create and send newsletters as well as manage subscribers and email lists. MailChimp newsletters can be created by starting with a template and customizing it with a drag-and-drop builder, or by coding your own using HTML. While paid tiers are available, for many people the free tier is perfectly adequate – allowing up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month.

The Sell Media MailChimp extension.

The premise behind our Sell Media MailChimp extension is simple: it adds a checkbox to your checkout page enabling users to opt-in to your MailChimp mailing list.

Purchasing the extension includes access to all 39 of our premium themes and all 15 Sell Media extensions. However, you’ll need a MailChimp account to utilize the extension  – so let’s walk through how to create one.

How to Sign Up for MailChimp

Signing up for a MailChimp account is quick and easy. Navigate to MailChimp and click the red Sign Up Free button in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Once you’ve filled out the sign-up form, click the Get Started! button to set up your account:

The MailChimp account creation screen.

Once your account is activated, run through the setup wizard and you’ll see your MailChimp dashboard:

The MailChimp dashboard.

Next, you’ll need to create a new mailing list. From the Get started section, click Create a List. From the next screen, click Create List:

Create photography email list button

Fill out all of the fields, then scroll down and click Save at the bottom to create your first photography email list.

The next step is installing the Sell Media plugin and MailChimp extension.

How to Install the Sell Media MailChimp Extension

In order to use the Sell Media MailChimp extension, you’ll firstly need to install the free Sell Media plugin, then purchase the MailChimp extension. Next, head to your Graph Paper Press dashboard, find the MailChimp extension, and click Download to download the ZIP file:

The Sell Media MailChimp extension's download button.

Next, from your WordPress website dashboard, navigate to Plugins > Add New and click Upload Plugin at the very top. Click Choose File, select your ZIP file, click Open, and then Install Now:

The Upload Plugin dialog.

Once plugin installation is complete, click Activate and move on to the final step – linking your MailChimp account to Sell Media.

How to Link MailChimp to Sell Media

For this step, you’ll need to access the Sell Media > Settings screen on your WordPress dashboard. Navigate to the Misc tab, and look for the MailChimp Settings section:

The MailChimp extension settings page.

To link MailChimp to Sell Media you’ll need an API key and the name of the list you created earlier. Head to your MailChimp account, log in, click your profile name in the top right-hand corner, and select Account:

The MailChimp Account tab.

From the next screen, click Extras, then select API keys from the drop-down menu:

The API Keys menu.

From this page, you can generate an API key for use with Sell Media.

Scroll down to the Your API keys section, and select the Create A Key button. MailChimp will create a fresh API key, and when finished you’ll see it displayed in your photography email list:

The API Keys displayed in MailChimp.

Select and copy the API key, go back to your Sell Media Settings screen in WordPress, and paste the key into the API Key field. Click the blue Save Settings button. Next, select your list from the Newsletter List drop-down and click Save Settings again. Now, whenever customers purchase an item, they’ll see the MailChimp newsletter sign-up checkbox at checkout.

Conclusion

An ever-growing list of email subscribers is pure digital gold. You can utilize your photography email list so that subscribers are invited to events, notified of new products, and get their hands on promos first! By installing the free Sell Media plugin and adding on our premium MailChimp extension, you can add users to your MailChimp mailing list directly from your Sell Media checkout page. It only takes three steps to get started:

  1. Open a MailChimp account if you don’t already have one.
  2. Install the Sell Media plugin and the Sell Media MailChimp extension.
  3. Create a new list within MailChimp, copy your API key, and enter it into Sell Media’s settings.

Do you have any questions about using the Sell Media MailChimp extension? Let us know in the comments section below!

Image credit: stevepb.

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