When I first started my photography business, I was receiving messages via Facebook, we'd pick a date, time, I'd tell my clients how much the session would cost them and what they would receive and then we'd do the session, I'd edit and then send them their gallery.
That was it.
Now, some people, clients or photographers, would read this and think 'Well, isn't that all you're supposed to do?' -- Generally speaking, yep.. that's really all that's expected of us!
But as a photographer, do you want to be put in that 'general' category with everyone else? No! We want to stand out. We want to provide our clients with a great service and, in the process, we want to be able to educate them on what we do, how we do it, and how that sets us apart from everyone else!
Now, my process is much different to what it was all those years ago. To be fair, I needed to have a few difficult experiences to realise that I needed to have a proper system in place. Let me walk you through how I automate everything, and why I love it so much!
MY BOOKING PROCESS
I will never book a client directly from Facebook (or Instagram -- back then, Instagram was mostly for taking photos of your food).
When someone contacts us for pricing information through social media or our website, I ask for their email address and I email them our booking information. This is a 'guide' we send out which has information about us and our products as well as how we do things and, of course, our pricing information.
This isn't an automated process. I physically email each person who enquires and write them a genuine message.
If that person loves us and wants to book, our automation process starts. Queue MailChimp.
MailChimp is a Marketing Automation Platform which allows you to create email marketing campaigns. In our case, we don't exactly use it for marketing. We use it to provide our clients with a better, more thorough service.
For example, when our wedding clients begin our booking process, we immediately start them off with our Wedding Experience process. This is a series of emails we space out from the booking process to the day of their wedding, which helps us to prepare them for how we work on a wedding day, as well as providing them with expert advice from other wedding vendors across Dubbo and Melbourne, and sharing our own advice in regards to things like wedding day timelines and maximising portrait time, etc.
Because this information stays the same for every wedding, it would be silly for us to create this content over and over again for every single booking. Instead, we create the content once (and update it as needed) and then add our clients to a special mailing list, specially created for our wedding couples.
MailChimp allows us to plan the content and have it sent to our couples when we specify.
For example, once their initial email is delivered, we could select the option for their second email to be delivered when they open their first one, or to be delivered a certain amount of hours, days or weeks after it's opened. There are a range of options to choose from, which make it so easy to customise this process just for our wedding couples.
I know our clients are being taken care of, they're receiving content we have specially designed with them in mind, and I've been able to customise this process to suit the way we like to share content with our clients.
Some other automation programs are ConvertKit, MadMimi, Infusionsoft, and LOADS more!
It pays to shop around and find one which offers what you need for your business. Try one with a free trial before you throw money at it! You may find the free version is absolutely fine for what you need it for!
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (OR SOFTWARE.. EACH TO THEIR OWN)
There are a lot of Customer Relationship Management Systems (or CRM Systems) which allow you to easily manage your clients and your communication with them.
In the past, we've used 17Hats, QuickBooks and MYOB.. QuickBooks and MYOB are more accounting and POS software than CRM software, and as a past accounting student (I say 'student' because I dropped out after 1 year!) I got free access to both programs through my course. Out of of the two, I much preferred QuickBooks, but they do both offer relatively the same service.
You truly need to shop around when you're looking for a CRM program. Look for the ones who offer free trials so you can try them out first.
These kinds of programs are great, for a number of reasons although, currently, we don't use a CRM system.
We found that 17Hats wasn't working the way we needed it to and the automated emails weren't as customisable like MailChimp is, so we said goodbye. In doing so, we needed a program for scheduling our sessions..
MANAGING OUR TIME WITH TIMELY
Timely is a new addition to our process.
After reaching out to some photographer friends of ours about wanting to find a system which allows us to send clients a link with our availabilities and then have them choose a date and time, rather than having to do the back and forth of when we're available and when they're available, it was suggested that we try Timely.
Firstly, I'll let you know that we have an affiliate link for Timely, so if you decide to use our link and sign up, we cop a free month out of it.
At first, Timely annoyed the shit out of me! I just couldn't get my calendar right and our availabilities. Then I couldn't work out including times for Melbourne and times for Dubbo. It drove me up the wall for a solid week. This was during a free trial period, so I was beginning to think that it wasn't worth it. Then, of course, my friend says to persevere.
She uses Timely through her 9-5 job, so her employer pays for the service -- so it isn't like she's going to get anything by suggesting we sign up!
Finally though, I figured it all out and it's made my life so much easier!!
During our booking process, our clients are sent an email (Through MailChimp) with our Timely calendar link.
When our clients click on it, it takes them through a system of selecting their preferred location, their date, and then their time.
We've already preselected our availabilities and as we receive bookings Timely makes us unavailable on those dates.
We also have the ability to block out certain days and times where we're unavailable -- for example, I always take the kids' birthday weeks off to allow for party prep.
Timely can also accept payments and we LOVE how Timely texts our clients to confirm their session, as well as reminding them of their session the day before.
Again, I'm sure there are other programs like Timely. I only actually know 'Toggl', which I believe is very similar to Timely, but I haven't used that particular program before.
Timely offers a free trial period, as I'm sure Toggl probably would too, so you could definitely try each of them out and see which one you like the most and which one works best for you.
If you did try Timely out, we'd love it if you used our link!
PLANOLY
Planoly has been an incredible tool for scheduling our Instagram posts.
It allows me to see what my grid will look like, write my captions, schedule it for my day and time of choice, and I can even prewrite the hashtags!
Planoly does have an 'auto post' option, which I was SO excited about when they finally rolled it out! But then I realised, to include the hashtags in an auto post, I'd have to include them in the actual caption which, for me, makes it all a little messy.
I like to put my hashtags in the comments of my post, so until the option comes out to automate that as well, I'm going to roll 'old school' and physically post myself.
Regardless, it's still great! All I have to do is plan everything, schedule, and then I receive a notification, straight to my phone, to let me know that it's time to post a scheduled post!
I click on the notification, select to 'post' to Instagram and then I'm done! I jump back into my Planoly app, select 'hashtags' and then select the hashtags I prewrote for that particular post (they each have headings) -- Planoly even has a cool option to just tap the heading you want to select and then it will automatically copy so you can paste it into the comment section of your post! Done!
There's also an option to plan your stories as well! I mostly use this for things like sharing images through my stories, or letting people know we have another live blog post.
There are loads of other options too, like tracking comments and likes etc. I don't use this, just because I'm not that into knowing all of that information inside and out. But you might be!
On top of all that, all my scheduled and past posts show up in a little calendar to show me when I've posted, when I've scheduled, and how many likes I've received on those posts. It's a great way to ensure I'm posting consistently.
Planoly offer a free version, which is somewhat limited, but you can get by with it without having to upgrade to a paid plan -- we did for a while!. It allows you to upload 30 images a month and you still get access to most things.
Facebook Scheduler
If you have a Facebook page for your business, you can schedule posts for your page.
It's as easy as creating your post and then scheduling it for the date and time you like -- that's it!
Automation just makes life easier. All of these things, you can certainly do without, but I know, for us, it means that we have one less thing to worry about when the unexpected happens.
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