Month: December 2017

Using Light Blue to help send a festive message to your customers

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As Christmas approaches, many photographers are turning their attention to contacting their customers in order to send their season’s greetings. You’ve been adding information to Light Blue throughout the year, and now’s a perfect time to get that information to go to work for you.

Using Light Blue you can find the records of customers who matter the most to you, and then use various tools within Light Blue to send them a festive message.

Querying for records

In an earlier blog post, I wrote in some detail about using the query dialog to dig deep into your data & find records that you were interested in. You can design a query to find the contacts that you’re interested in reaching – perhaps all of your customers who’ve spent over a certain amount?

Once you’ve found the records that you want to send something to, you can use Light Blue to help you to reach out to them.

Printing address labels or envelopes

Printing your customers addresses onto labels or envelopes en mass is really simple. After performing your query, simply click Print/Send and choose the Labels / Envelopes option to print all of the primary addresses of your main contacts onto labels or envelopes.

Using mail merge documents to send a personalised letter

You may want to send a personalised letter that you plan to enclose in a card. We’ve got a handy tutorial all about using your own word processor to generate template letters:

There’s also a comprehensive list of all of the mail-merge tags that you can use in Light Blue, which will populate your template documents with information from your records.

Exporting email addresses to Mail Chimp

If you plan to send out a lot of emails in one big festive mail shot, you could export a spreadsheet of your customers email addresses to upload to something like MailChimp. Using the results of the query you ran earlier, simply click File > Export Email Addresses to save a CSV spreadsheet which can be uploaded as part of an email campaign.

 

ClickBook follow-on bookings are now being sent to Light Blue

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For members of the Click Group, Light Blue has an integration with the ClickBook booking system. We’re continuing to work with the developers of ClickBook v2 to make our integration more helpful to photographers using our systems.

We’re pleased to announce that ClickBook is now sending details of follow-on bookings made in their system to Light Blue.

When you’re setting up your job types in ClickBook, you’re able to create job types that book out chunks of time in multiple rooms. For example, you could have a shoot in your studio that’s immediately followed by an instant viewing session in your viewing room. Or, for a studio that offers makeovers, you could have a workflow where clients start off in your makeup room, then move to the studio for their shoot, and finish the booking with a viewing in your viewing room.

When you’re setting up your job types in ClickBook, you can use its follow-on booking settings to assign a separate room to each part of the job. You can also tell ClickBook which part of the booking should be turned into a shoot record in Light Blue. All of the other parts of the booking will be added to Light Blue as appointments linked to that main shoot record.

If you don’t use follow-on bookings in ClickBook, or if the first part of the job type is always the shoot, there’s nothing that you need to change. If you have appointments that take place before the shoot, all you need to do is update your job types in ClickBook so that it can tell Light Blue which part of the booking is the shoot.

Here you can see a booking that’s been received via ClickBook, which has follow on appointments associated with it, too. You’ll notice that there’s two appointments linked to the shoot – the makeover appointment occurs before the shoot, in the makeover room, and the viewing appointment occurs after the shoot in the viewing room.