How to Stay Top of Mind With Past Clients (No Newsletter Needed)

By Elizabeth Lamb, award-winning photographer, owner of Elizabeth Williamsberg Photography, and 17hats Ambassador. Adapted from her feature in the October 2026 issue of The Journey.

So you ran the ad campaign. You added a list of potential buyers to 17hats, sent your special offer, and maybe converted a few into paying clients. Now your contacts are a mix of cold prospects, warm leads, and past clients whose workflows finished months ago.

Now what?

The usual advice is a mailing list and a nurture sequence. Elizabeth Lamb, a portrait photographer in London, has a problem with that advice. To a marketing-weary client, the slick emails you spent hours designing smell like sales pitches and go straight into the bin. Open rates drop, email providers start flagging you as spam, and the client you meant to keep warm is left out in the cold.

Her approach is to build the relationship first and let the marketing come after. In 17hats she does it with one internal project and three workflows that send a handful of personal, useful emails at moments that matter to the client (their birthday, the holidays) and remind her when a real gift or a personal touch is in order. It runs all year and costs her a few minutes per client.

Step one: the Client Engagement project

Every lead that enters Elizabeth’s 17hats account is assigned a project called “Client Engagement.” This is where all the relationship workflows live, separate from whatever paid work they book.

When she creates it, she switches Client Portal off. The project is purely internal. The client never sees it, and it doesn’t clutter their view of the real work.

Step two: the annual engagement workflow

The first workflow is really a checklist. Each to-do asks a question about the client, and marking it complete creates the follow-on workflow that fits. If a question doesn’t apply (an unmarried client doesn’t need an anniversary workflow), she deletes that to-do.

For each lead, it looks like this:

• To Do: Client married? (creates the Anniversary workflow)
• To Do: Client engaged? (creates a Congratulations Wedding workflow)
• To Do: Client pregnant? (creates a Congratulations Baby workflow)
• To Do: Client has children? (creates a Child Birthday workflow)
• Action: Create the Happy Birthday workflow
• Action: Create the End of Year workflow

Those last two run automatically for every single contact, so each person gets at least two touchpoints a year even if Elizabeth never ticks a box.

The birthday workflow

The base date is the client’s birthday. Everything else counts from there.

• 31 days before: a to-do to review the client and decide whether they get a deluxe birthday gift (which creates a VIP Birthday Gifting workflow).
• 30 days before: an email, “Your Birthday is Coming Up.”
• On the day: an email, “Happy Birthday!”

The early email isn’t a promo. It offers something useful (her example is a “Favorite London Celebration Locations” PDF) and tells them to watch for a little gift. That gift might be a physical present or a voucher for a birthday mini session, depending on the client’s status. The to-do a month out is what gives her time to decide.

The end-of-year workflow

This one is anchored to Christmas Day and starts in September. It’s there to warm clients up for holiday portraits, and also to quietly set up next year.

Each email has something of value in it and a small nudge to book. By the time a client is ready for holiday portraits, Elizabeth is the photographer already in their inbox with the dates they need. (If you’re reading this in late October and wishing you’d set it up in August, the November and December steps still work on their own. Start there.)

The last three steps are the clever bit. The workflow rebuilds itself for next year and then archives the old project, so the whole thing rolls over without her having to remember it exists.

The “Recent Memory” field

This is the detail that makes the emails read like notes from a person.

Elizabeth created a custom field called “Recent Memory.” After each contact with a client, she jots down a line she could add as a personal touch later. Her example: “It was a joy to shoot your boudoir portraits in August, and I hope Emily enjoyed the folio box of images we created for her birthday!”

In her Happy Holidays email, a token pulls that field in as a line near the end. Everyone gets the same email, and every email says something only that client would recognize.

To set one up, go to Account Settings, find the Custom Fields tab in the Account Templates section, and add the fields your workflows need. Wedding anniversaries and baby due dates are the obvious ones, but “Recent Memory” is the one we’d copy first.

Test before anything goes near a client

Elizabeth plans every workflow backward from its base date until each step is mapped. Then, before adding a workflow to any client project, she tests it on herself.

“I have myself as a contact in 17hats with a Project called ‘Workflow Tests,'” she writes, “and every workflow runs at least once in the Workflow Test project to catch any mistakes like a year of emails all sending at the same time.”

We’d guess that example comes from experience. A wrong delay setting is an easy mistake to make and a very public one when it fires, so ten minutes of testing is cheap insurance.

Does this work if you’re not a photographer?

Birthday emails make sense for a portrait photographer. They might not for you. Elizabeth’s own example: if you work as an expert witness, a birthday greeting to the attorneys who’ve hired you is probably odd, but a quarterly email listing the dates you’re unavailable to testify for the next three months would be welcome.

So ask what your clients would actually be glad to hear from you about, and when. Renewal dates, seasonal deadlines, the anniversary of a project, the start of their busy season. Pick two or three and build those.

Keep in mind what these emails are for. They aren’t sales pitches (that’s what your email marketing is for). They exist to keep giving the client something useful after the first inquiry, remind them you exist, and build the relationship so that your marketing lands when it does arrive.

FAQ

How often should you contact past clients?
Elizabeth’s floor is two touchpoints a year for everyone (a birthday and the holidays), with more for clients who’ve had a wedding, a baby, or an anniversary. The rhythm matters less than each message being worth opening.

Is this different from email marketing?
Yes. Her engagement emails carry no sales pitch. They’re personal, useful, and triggered by the client’s own dates. Promotions stay in her regular marketing, which these emails make people more willing to read.

Does this only work for photographers?
No, though the touchpoints change. Anyone with repeat or referral business can use the same structure: one internal project, an annual checklist workflow, and two or three date-based workflows that suit your clients.

What’s a base date in a 17hats workflow?
It’s the date every step is counted from. In the birthday workflow it’s the client’s birthday, so “30 days before base date” sends the first email a month ahead.

About the author

Elizabeth Lamb is an award-winning photographer, 17hats Ambassador, and owner of Elizabeth Williamsberg Photography in London, England. She works with women for whom the idea of stepping in front of a camera causes existential dread. Drawing on 25 years of experience, a psychology degree, and her own journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance, she helps women feel confident on camera and creates portraits they are proud to display and share.

Elizabeth’s full feature, with her workflows laid out step by step, is in the October 2026 issue of The Journey. Projects, custom fields, tokens and workflows all come with 17hats, and if you’d rather start from a template than a blank screen, the 17hats Marketplace has plenty built by people who do this for a living.