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Today we are going to talk about two tools you need to be using in your photography business. I switched over and started using these two tools around the same exact time and I have seen so much success. I started using a new email marketing system that we did chat about a few episodes ago, but I also started using a new customer management system.

The First Tool: Flodesk

Tool number one is Flodesk. This is the new email marketing system for photographers. This is the one that I talked about a couple episodes back. I decided to do a giveaway and required the participants to enter their first name and an email address. I grew my email subscribers by 100 overnight and now I have more than 500 email subscribers of people who want to hear about my photography business.

Why use email marketing?

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 the one constant to the ever changing social media platforms out there. So I highly encourage you to start using email marketing.

The awesome thing about Flodesk is how easy it is to use and how beautiful the emails are. The thing that frustrated me the most about using other email platforms such as MailChimp and Convertkit were they were so ugly and basic. We’re in the photography industry and our content needs to be visually pleasing. It needs to be able to capture people’s attention. That is why I absolutely love Flodesk. You’ve got drag and drop templates and everything’s on brand. You put in your brand colors and they are always pre-loaded.

Email marketers use to teach that if the email content was too big, it would never download or get delivered. Well, I have tested multiple pictures and file sizes and they have been delivered every single time. The primary reason for this is that Flodesk allows you to authenticate your website. Flodesk is a must have.

The Second Tool: Iris-Works

I’ve been in business for over five years now and I have always had a paper planner because I’m a pen and paper girl. While I still love a paper planner, I am transitioning everything over to this platform. When potential clients would message me, they’d say: “Hey, I need to get family pictures done. What do you have available?” And every time my response would be something along the lines of: “let me check my planner when I get back home.”

The next tool that you absolutely need to be using in your photography business is this new customer management system known as Iris-Works. I cannot even begin to tell you the amount of time and energy this one 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.

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.’ I would eventually get back to them. I felt horrible because it was way longer of a wait than it should have been. It was honestly very unprofessional to be running my business that way.

No more messaging back and forth.

With Iris-Works, the new way of doing things is my entire process is streamlined. I am so excited. So real quick though, let me back up. I was using an online customer management system. I was using Dubsado and it was great. It was good for invoicing and contracts, but their scheduler was very complicated and I couldn’t ever give people an easy to book option off of that.

So with Iris works, their calendar is freaking awesome. 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 two days of mini sessions. You already know 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. 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.

Wait, there’s more?

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 the link. You can save it to your phone or you can add it to an autoresponder if you choose to do things that way, especially on Facebook messenger. When people message me, 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 and respond to them.

Another thing is their workflows are absolutely doable and efficient. I had a 15 to 20 step process from inquiry to gallery delivery and asking for a review when I was using Dubsado. And now that I’m with Iris-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 seamless.

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 series.

Try these two tools: Flodesk and Iris-Works. Please check them out. 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.

Try Flodesk and get 50% off for LIFE.
Try Iris-Works and use the code “BROOKE” to get 20% off your subscription.