Want to know how I have been increasing my revenue while working LESS? I'm no longer messaging clients back and forth just to find a date on my calendar and I'm no longer forgetting to respond! (Don't judge me, you've done it too!) There are two tools that I have implemented into my business recently that have completely transformed my workflow and bottom line. You truly cannot afford to miss this episode!
Use this link for 50% off for LIFE! https://flodesk.com/c/3C8R9X
Use code BROOKE for 20% off any Iris-Works Subscription.
Tune into the episode to learn more about these awesome tools!
Loving this podcast? Come join us in the NEW Photographer Community on Facebook.
Join Brooke for a FREE Masterclass on Monday April 29th! Sign up for How to Book More Photography Sessions in 60 Days Masterclass.
Want to know how I have been increasing my revenue while working LESS? I'm no longer messaging clients back and forth just to find a date on my calendar and I'm no longer forgetting to respond! (Don't judge me, you've done it too!) There are two tools that I have implemented into my business recently that have completely transformed my workflow and bottom line. You truly cannot afford to miss this episode!
Use this link for 50% off for LIFE! https://flodesk.com/c/3C8R9X
Use code BROOKE for 20% off any Iris-Works Subscription.
Tune into the episode to learn more about these awesome tools!
Loving this podcast? Come join us in the NEW Photographer Community on Facebook.
Join Brooke for a FREE Masterclass on Monday April 29th! Sign up for How to Book More Photography Sessions in 60 Days Masterclass.
[inaudible].
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:[inaudible]. Welcome to the Frame your way photography podcast. I'm your host Brooke Jefferson. I'm a wife& Mama to two and full time photographer and business coach. I created this podcast with the aspiring photographer in mind to bring you inspiring stories, strategies to help you go from zero to multiple figures and tips and tricks to help me get one step closer to work life harmony. Are you ready to frame your way to your dream career? Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to another episode of the frame your way photography podcast. You guys, I am so humbled and overwhelmed and so, so grateful for how many of you that tune in every Thursday if you just stumbled across the podcast. Thank you for being here. Those of you that started listening with me back in April of this year, I love you too. I'm forever indebted to you guys. I am just shocked. I'm just shocked by how much this has grown. With that being said, I am going to take just a quick second before I jump into today's episode and ask you to please, please, please leave a rating and review. I would love your five stars. If you truly believe that this podcast deserves five stars for bringing you some awesome value and some amazing interviews from those who have gone before us and those that are in the trenches of this photography industry, I would truly, truly appreciate it. And please screenshot this episode and Post it on Instagram stories tagging at Brook Janae photography and I will be sure to reshare and tag you back and I'll also make sure I follow you. Okay. So today we are going to talk about two tools you need to be using in your photography business. These two tools. I switched over and started using these two tools around the same exact time and I have seen so much awesome this I don't even know and don't even know how to describe it, but I started using a new email marketing system that yes, we did chat about a few episodes ago, but also another customer management system. And you guys, I'm going to sit here and rave about these two things and I'm gonna make it short and sweet and I'm going to highly encourage you to go try out their free trials. One of them is the 14 day trial and the other one I believe is a day trial. It may now be to a two week trial but you guys have to try them out. Tool number one is flow desk. This is the new email marketing system for photographers. This is the one that I talked about a couple episodes back about how I decided to do a giveaway and the requirement to enter was a first name and an email address and I grew my email subscribers by 100 overnight and now I have more than 500 email subscribers if people who want to hear about my photography business and my upcoming specials and workshops and all the things. So if you have not already been using email marketing, definitely check it out, educate yourself. Email marketing is where it is at these days. It has been that way for a long time. It is not going anywhere. It is the one constant to the ever changing social media platforms out there. So I highly encourage you to start doing that. The awesome thing about flow desk is, well there's a lot of awesome things, but the one thing that I'm loving the most is how easy to use it is and how beautiful it is. The number one thing that frustrated me the most about using other email platforms such as MailChimp, a convert kit was they were so ugly, ugly and basic. And you know, we're in the photography industry and we are very visual and our stuff needs to be very on brand and visual. It needs to be able to capture people's attention and make them read and see what we have going on. And that is why I absolutely love flow desk. You've got drag and drop templates, everything's on brand. You put in your brand colors and they're always there for one click of a button for you to change colors out of a template. So please go check it out. And also I thought, hmm, I used to hear that if you used too much, you know, or too many pictures and that kind of thing and if the email was too big and it would never download and it wouldn't get delivered. Well you guys, I have tested everything from multiple pictures to one picture, all the templates that they have and they are delivered every single time because they have a way for you to authenticate your, I don't even think I just said that word right, but you guys know what I mean. For you to go in and for you to authenticate your website so that it is delivered every single time. Please go check out flow desk. Be sure to check the description of today's podcast and you can do a click my link and you can get some money off. The next thing, the next tool that you absolutely need to be using in photography business is this new customer management system known as drum roll please. Iris works, Iris Dash Works, you guys, I cannot even begin to tell you the amount of time and energy. This one website platform has saved me. So real quick just to really let you know how much of a time saver and energy saver this is. Let me tell you how I was doing things. I've been in business for over five years now and I have for the past five years, always had a paper planner because I'm very pen and paper girl. I love a paper planner and I still have a paper planner even with this, but you're going to see what I mean. But anyway, so I always have told people they would message me, they'd say, Hey, I need to get family pictures done. What do you have available? And every single time my response would be something along the lines of, let me check my planner when I get back home. Now the majority of the time I would remember, it wouldn't be right when I got home, but it would be after I had some time to sit down and think, oh my gosh, I'm forgetting something. And then it was, you know, getting back to a client and then I felt horrible because it was way longer of a wait than it should have been. And then I felt really bad for the times that my mom brain never remembered about them until they had to follow up with me again. So very unprofessional is what I was doing. Okay. Let just, that's just not okay. And at least, and it probably bothered me more than it bothered anybody else, but you know, I'm very big on customer experiences. That is not a good customer experience. So four or five years, that is what I did. And I would literally have to look on the calendar and decide, do I want to take pictures this day? What dates do I want to send them back? Blah, blah, blah. Okay, well the new way of doing things is I was able to, um, sign up for an account with IRS works and it has so many features inside of it. I am so excited. So real quick though, let me back up. I was using an online customer management system. I was using Deb Sato and it was great. It was good for invoicing, it was good for contracts, but their scheduler was very complicated and I couldn't ever give people like an easy to book option off of that. Like I would have to spend hours just manually making the calendar work and I would have to go on all the days that I didn't want to book a session. I would have to go market on available. And you guys, it was just such a time sucker and also I couldn't access it, you know, for my phone for a long time. And it was just, it was just chaotic and I was basically wasting money. So with Iris works, their calendar is freaking awesome. They have two types. They've got a calendar where you can sync it to your phone and yes, I know that Deb Sato and honeybook do that too. But you get a booking calendar where you basically say, what kind of session do you want to mark available? So let's say you're doing um, two days of mini sessions and you already know what that, what the dates are and you know that they're going to be 15 minutes slots. You go into this calendar, you tell it it's going to be a 15 minute increment with five minutes in between, and then you just start clicking the two dates and you just, you literally click on the calendar of the date you want and then you just start pressing in the times that you're available that day for many sessions. It's just so easy and it's amazing. And that is only the first feature that I even told you about, which was the booking calendar. Not only that, they give you a booking calendar link. So once you've got all the dates in there and you're ready to share and you want people to start booking you copy and paste that link they gave you, you save it to your phone, you add it to an autoresponder if you choose to do things that way, especially on Facebook messenger, when people message me, and even sometimes I do it on my personal page and the photography page on the photography page, I now have an autoresponder with a link to my booking calendar so that they don't have to wait for me to get the notification or for me to get back to them. They can immediately see if the day that they're inquiring for is available or if it's not, and then we don't have to go round and round and round for hours or days just to figure out that our schedules are not going to coincide with each other. So that is my favorite part of it. Another thing is their workflows are absolutely, absolutely doable and efficient. It's just awesome. So I ended up Sodom. I had basically probably a 15 to 20 step process from inquiry to gallery delivery and asking for a review. And now that I'm with IRS works, you want to know how many steps I have in my workflow? Six. That's it. Why? Because it is like it just flows together. It's just seamless. It's a seamless process. So there is, there's just so many features you guys, I'm, if you can't tell, I'm a little too excited about these two tools, but I am telling you that together these tools are just amazing and I love the client portal inside of IRS works. So I forever have my client's first name, last name, email, phone number. I don't ever have to ask them for that again. And it goes into their client portal. I can even add who their husband or wife is, their kids, kids names, birthdays. I mean it's just the coolest thing ever. And you get to keep contracts on file, you get to keep questionnaires on file and yes, I know the other to have that. But you guys just don't understand how easy this one thing is. But the, but the reason that I was able to shave down my process to six steps is because you can attach more than one file. Are y'all hearing the angels saying if you are using a customer management system, you know what I'm talking about when you know how frustrating, like why can't I send a contract and an invoice and the client style guide all at once because it doesn't fit because they don't let you, cause that wasn't an option. And so it was just really frustrating and if it was an option it still wouldn't look as good as it does and Iris works. So okay, I'm going to step down a notch. Let me come down a notch because I'm just like overly excited. But here's why I'm so excited. I sent an email so I sent an email out with flow desk with my booking link from iris works, sent it out to my subscribers. I made it super pretty. I made it a one click button letting people know I have about five sessions left for the year. Here are your options. Go ahead and book it now before you forget. And then boom. And you know what happened by that night I booked every single session for 2019 every single session. So I think some of you are motivated right now to go try out these two tools and I would, I will give you a hand clap cause I think that's amazing and you should because these two tools have dramatically increased my revenue and decreased the amount of energy and time that I have to put into it because I'm not having to go round and round and round with conversations with messages. I can just send a link, people can see if that works for them. They book it the second they book it, IRS works, gives them my workflow that goes with that session. And then everybody is getting the same client experience or getting all the information in a timely fashion. They're not waiting on mom brain broke to remember. And guys, I'm just amazed. So please, if you're not using either of these tools, please look into them. First of all, you save 50% off with flow desk. Go to the description of this podcast and click on my link. And you can use that. Um, it's an affiliate link. You're welcome and you can use that and you can pay$19 a month compared to the$29 a month that I was paying with convert kit. Not to mention I was almost reaching my limit on subscribers and then it was going to go up even more than what I was paying. And with flodesk, you only have to pay$19 a month regardless of how many people, how many emails, et Cetera. There's no caps. So it was a no brainer. I was saving 10 bucks a month, which is a$120 a year. And I hope I just did my math right because you guys, I hated math growing up anyway. And then with IRS works, I remember like comparing the cost with Dubsado and I want to say it was like right around the same thing I was paying. So it was just like a no brainer to switch. My Dubsado was expiring and the next, I think 60 days. And so I just went ahead and made the switch and I don't regret any of it, which is why I made an entire podcast episode for you guys so that you could get in on these two tools and dramatically change your business. Be more efficient, spend more time with the people you want to spend more time with. Maybe you just need more time so you can go binge watch your favorite Netflix episode. Right now I've been binge watching younger on Hulu, not to get off on a tangent or anything, but when I say Binge Watch, I will work for about five hours straight, just doing things that I need to be doing and then I'll spend the rest of the evening in between my kids needing things, needing a stack, needing a bath, et Cetera, watching younger. So you know, get, get some time back and before I keep going and spiraling out of excitement and into random topics, that's what I wanted to share with you today. Flow desk, Iris works. Please check them out. Be sure to check the description, use my affiliate links to save you some money and take advantage of their free trials. It doesn't hurt to try it out, especially if you end up loving it and committing to it. And that's all for today's episode. Thank you so much, guys for tuning in and I will see you next week.
Speaker 1:[inaudible].