5 Emails You NEED to Prepare Clients for Their Newborn Session

Once your client books their newborn session a whole new portion of your client experience kicks into gear. It’s time to help your future parents prepare for their newborn session!

I’m all about the client experience and my favorite way to offer a seamless experience is to use customized email templates for newborn photographers. This allows you to automate the majority of the communication with your soon-to-be parents to prepare them for their session. 

In this blog, I’m going over the 5 most important email templates you need to prepare clients for their newborn session. These aren’t all the emails you’ll need in your workflow (there are about 41 emails newborn photographers need) but these are the five I’ve found serve you and your client the most.

The Process Email

The Process Email is one of the first emails you should send after a client signs their contract. This email is where you’ll welcome families and tell them how excited you are to capture their newborn’s first photos. 

It sets the tone for this portion of your client experience.

You can use this opportunity to tell parents a few key details they need to know, without overwhelming them. After all, you have many more months to disseminate information. The idea is to give them only the most important details, plus an idea of what to expect over the next few months as you all wait for their baby to arrive.

This email template will remind your clients of key details like:

• How scheduling works
• How to contact you
• And what the next steps are

Here’s a great example how we were able to take that (already written for you content) and copy it straight into our Canva template!

The Newborn Questionnaire Email

Your clients aren’t the only ones who have a lot of questions. Whether you’re an in-studio photographer or an at-home newborn photographer, you’re going to need to collect information from the parents-to-be.

Everyone’s questionnaire will look different, but your email can be templated and automated to be sent after your process email. Your Newborn Questionnaire email should be short and sweet. 

The most important part of this email is to include when you need the questionnaire back. If you leave it up in the air, clients will wait until the last minute to align with you on what kind of session they want and may leave you feeling unprepared. 

In fact, it never hurts to build in additional Questionnaire reminder emails too. 😉

The Newborn Session Prep Packet Email

As a newborn photographer, you’re going to be working with a lot of new parents who (between you and me) have no clue what to expect. That’s ok! I had no idea what to expect with my first kiddo’s photos too! That’s why it’s so important to bundle all the answers they need to prepare for their session into one place.

Your Newborn Session Prep Packet is their North Star to reference things like:

• FAQs about your process
• A link to schedule their session date
• Tips on how to prepare their baby for the session
• Styling tips on what to wear

The reason why I recommend you send your Prep Packets in its own email is that the details of this packet are so crucial to the parents. Unless you want a ton of emails asking questions that could have been answered with your packet, you want this email to be something they can star and quickly reference SOLO. You don’t want to lump it in with other emails to get buried in their inbox. 

I always like to send this email within the first week after your newborn photography client signs their contract.

The 4-Week Check-In Email

Confession time: I’m skipping a few sale-oriented emails and reminder emails that you could send between the Prep Packet email and this one. While these other emails are important, it’s mostly for your benefit to do pre-selling before your client’s due date. You can grab your copy of those emails in my Newborn Photographer Email Template bundle in the shop because this article is all about the client experience.

And your 4-week check-in email is going to be a big part of creating a seamless client experience.

Why? If you’re like most newborn photographers, you probably book out months in advance of the actual session date. That’s a long time!

Including a 4-week check-in allows you to touch base with your client and let them know you haven’t forgotten about them. It also gives your client an opportunity to tell you if anything has changed. (Aka, baby is coming WAY sooner than you expected!)

Don’t skip the check-in email!

The Pre-Session Reminder Email

This email should be sent to your client the day before your session. Your Pre-Session Reminder is another opportunity for you to touch base with your client and give them all the details of their session.

At this point, if you’re following my newborn email template workflow then you’ve sent quite a few emails back and forth. Your clients feel well-attended and excited about working with you. It may be tempting to skip this email or rely on a Google Calendar invite to remind your clients of their sessions.

NEVER skip the reminder email!

First of all, Google Calendar forgets to remind people of their sessions all the time. (Speaking from experience…) Secondly, remember, you’re dealing with new parents. They have a lot going on! Sending them a gentle reminder is welcome. 

What to include in your pre- newborn session reminder email:

• Your contact information
• Time and location
• One last opportunity to ask you any questions

Client Experience is Everything for Newborn Photography

Client experience is what people remember you by. As a newborn photographer, your client experience needs to be seamless for you and the new parents you service. 

Having a solid workflow, filled with pre-written email templates you can automate, is great for you and your clients. It lets your client feels like they’re getting personalized attention throughout the entire process, while you’re busy running your business (or ordering a personalized onesie to give them after the session). 

If you’re wanting to save time and skip having to write all the emails in your client workflow, you can always hop over to my shop to grab the 41 Newborn Photographer Email Templates bundle. It gives you all the emails and the schedule on when to send them. So all that’s left for you to do is simply add your branding and copy/paste it into your CRM!