The Perfect Email Promo: Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek

Vienna-based editorial photographer Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek listened to our webinar with Whitney Lawson from Travel+Leisure, and decided to put her suggestions into practice. “It’s really not common in Austria to do something like this. Normally, you schedule an appointment [with a photo editor], and weeks later, they might call you for a job.”

Daniel is an editorial and portrait photographer, working for a number of top quality magazines in Austria and Germany, but he laments the decline of editorial rates in Austria, and is looking to diversify by finding more clients both domestically and internationally.

Daniel wanted to create an edit and layout that was customized to Travel+Leisure, so he began by looking at the website, the promos that were features on the webinar, and the magazine itself. “After looking at the magazine, I was confused even more because there was a wide variety of [photographic] styles. So I stopped looking, and thought about travel images that I liked.” He started with 50 images which he opened in Photoshop, and tried to combine them to find something that fit – the “hardest part” in his opinion.

“I tried to play with the lines on the horizon, and sometimes I was trying to combine the colors.”

He took a minimalist approach to including contact information. “I didn’t want to put too much information like a whole biography, but I wanted to put the most important information.” He astutely notes that if an editor were to google his name, they could easily find him and his online presence.

He followed Whitney’s advice not to email on a Monday, and instead sent off a series of 9 images on a Thursday.

And what did Whitney think?
“This is a nice one…  people are paying attention!  He followed my advice perfectly”

We think it’s successful because the images display inline (i.e. there’s no need to double click on an attachment to see the contents), he selected an edit that was specific to the magazine’s aesthetic, he provided prominent contact information on each image which is incredibly helpful if the images are separated from the email.