5 tips for getting started with Light Blue

We understand that it can be daunting learning a new software, especially one that’s as powerful and full of features as Light Blue. Its easy to put it off because its all too overwhelming. We want to help!

We have a great “Setting up Light Blue” webinar to help you get set up and if you have a spare hour its really worth sitting down to watch it. Sometimes, you just want some quick start tips. Today’s blog post gives you some easy ways to get begin setting up Light Blue for your business.

1. Input your upcoming shoots into Light Blue

One of the first things we recommend doing is to start inputting any current enquiries or confirmed shoots. It helps get you more familiar with the shoot records.

2. Set up your workflows

Using a workflow is a really quick way of scheduling tasks, emails, text messages, and appointments for a shoot. They’re easy to set up, and help you to deliver excellent service to your clients by making sure that you’re reminded about all of the key steps that you want a job to go through.

We recommend sitting down and detailing all the steps you do for each type of shoot. Include all tasks, emails, meetings you might have connected with the shoot. You will want to create an enquiry workflow, a confirmation workflow and one for each shoot type and think about when you do the tasks.

Eg your confirmation workflow might have the following simple steps:

• Respond to enquiry (email)
• Send a text message saying you have emailed them some information (text)
• Follow up enquiry (email)

A simple portrait shoot workflow might be:

• Check Portrait shoot details day before (task)
• Send reminder email with direction for session (email)
• Send text message reminder about session (text)
• Download and back up images (task)
• Post production (task)
• Arrange viewing session (email)

Once you have detailed your workflow sets you should add them into Light Blue. Setting up Workflows

3. Template Emails

A great way of speeding up your business admin is using template emails. Rather than typing an individual response to each email you receive you can set up a series of template emails that you send from initial enquiry through to a client collection their order.

How to set up and send emails in Light Blue

You may already have a list of emails you send clients as part of the workflow planning we suggested in the previous section. If you don’t, sit down and write a list of all the emails you send a client throughout a job so that you can create templates for each one.

If you are looking for inspiration on some ideas for email templates, our recent blog post “Ten essential email templates for photographers” might help!

4. Set up the online portal

Our online services enable you to share your information between computers, hook up your web contact forms to your account, use our great online contract signing services and lets your clients pay your invoices online.

You will want to set up the online portal with so that any contract, forms or online invoices show your business branding. Some of our customers have more than one brand eg a wedding and a newborn business. You can use as many different brands as you like, there’s no limit!

Setting up the online portal

5. Contact forms

One of the great benefits of using our online services is that you can add contact forms to your website that send enquiries into your inbox in Light Blue. No more manually inputting all the enquiry, you simply import the data as a new shoot record.

How to set up online forms

Embedding a contact form into your website

We hope this helps you with getting set up with Light Blue and allows you to enjoy the benefits of several of its features. We understand that people learn in different ways and that no two businesses are the same, so if you’d like some more help with getting the most out of Light Blue then we’d be delighted to chat with you over a 1 to 1 screen sharing session.

Book a 1to1 screenshare