Category: Online Services

New online scheduling features

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Light Blue’s online scheduling feature is very popular with our subscribers because it they make it really easy for your clients to book shoots or meetings with you without needing to send messages back and forth to find the perfect time. We’ve just added a new feature to our scheduling calendars, and more are coming very soon…

First of all, you’ll notice that the booking confirmation page now features “Add to Apple Calendar/Outlook” and “Add to Google Calendar” buttons. Your clients can use these to quickly add their booking to their calendar, and of course you can use Light Blue’s powerful workflows feature to send automated reminders via email and text message.

Today, we’ve started beta testing another new scheduling feature: you can use scheduling requests to book meetings or shoots with existing clients. Your clients will love them because the booking form will be pre-filled with the information that you already have, and you will save time because the event that’s created will automatically be linked to the relevant records in Light Blue. Please let us know if you’d like to join our list of beta testers so that you can start using this feature today!

Light Blue 2022.1 available with new online scheduling features

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Light Blue’s new online scheduling calendars allow your clients to book shoots and appointments directly into your diary. You no longer need to send messages back and forth to find the perfect time, or rely on complicated integrations with third-party tools. 

We’re excited to announce launch of the latest version which is available as a free upgrade for all subscribers.

“Light Blue’s online scheduling automates another task that helps me focus on improving other aspects of my business, and makes the whole experience much more professional and seamless for my clients.” – Michael Love

Streamline enquiry management

Online scheduling simplifies the booking process for your clients whilst providing tight integration with Light Blue’s other powerful features such as contracts, forms, payments, and workflows (including automated emails and text messages), so you have all the important details together in one place.

“I can’t always reply to client’s calls and emails when they want to book me. Now they can check my availability and book without waiting for me to get back to them. It saves so much time for me and is a better experience for the client!” – Jane Jordan

Avoid double bookings

We know that you have to juggle all sorts of commitments so, as well as automatically blocking off times that clash with events in Light Blue, we’ve also made it possible to link your scheduling calendars to Google Calendar or calendar feeds that you can use to stop clients from making bookings that clash with your personal commitments.

Your availability is updated in real-time as you (and your clients!) schedule events in your diary, and it’s easy for you to set up weekly availability as well as ad-hoc availability for specific types of event.

“It’s a really good way to streamline booking in smaller sessions so you have to do very little, but from the client point of view it’s extremely efficient and straightforward. You can also set options to make sure you aren’t overwhelmed and ensure that your client has all the information they need to proceed without having to send a million emails. Plus, when you open Light Blue, everything you need is at your fingertips.” – Angela Ward-Brown

Free upgrade for subscribers

This has been a really popular feature request and something that we’ve been keen to implement for some time, so we are really pleased to have had such positive feedback from our testers and are delighted to offer this feature to our subscribers for no extra cost.

“Having CRM and scheduling in the same program saves a ton of time and money. Plus it saves all the headaches of trying to make two separate systems integrate.” – Julian Austin

Get started by updating to Light Blue 2022.1  and then adding a scheduling calendar via the Preferences window. Learn more about how to set up and use online scheduling calendars in our detailed help article.

You can find out about the many other new features and changes in this release in the Light Blue 2022.1 release notes.

Light Blue 2022.1 release notes

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Light Blue 2022.1 is a major update that introduces an online scheduling tool that allows your clients to book shoots and appointments directly into your diary. You no longer need to send messages back and forth to find the perfect time, or rely on complicated integrations with third-party tools.

Setting up our online scheduling tool is quick and easy, and you can choose which types of shoot or appointment are available online. Your availability is updated in real-time as you (and your clients!) schedule events in your diary, and it’s easy for you to set up regular availability as well as ad-hoc availability for specific types of event.

Our new online scheduling features also give you options to include a customised booking form, contract, and booking fee when a client is scheduling a shoot, making the online booking process easier than ever. It’s also tightly integrated with Light Blue’s automation tools, so the reminder emails, text messages, and tasks from your workflows help you to deliver great a great service for your clients.

Read on for a summary of the other new features and changes included in Light Blue 2022.1…

Continue reading “Light Blue 2022.1 release notes”

Our new online scheduling calendars are available for testing

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We’re delighted to let you know that our next major update is in prerelease testing and includes one of our most popular feature requests: an online scheduling tool that allows your clients to book shoots and appointments directly into your diary. You no longer need to send messages back and forth to find the perfect time, or rely on complicated integrations with third-party tools.

Setting up our online scheduling tool is quick and easy, and you can choose which types of shoot or appointment are available online. Your availability is updated in real-time as you (and your clients!) schedule events in your diary, and it’s easy for you to set up weekly availability as well as ad-hoc availability for specific types of event.

Our new online scheduling features give you the option to include a customised booking form, contract, and booking fee when a client is scheduling a shoot, making the online booking process easier than ever. It’s also tightly integrated with Light Blue’s automation tools, so the reminder emails, text messages, and tasks from your workflows help you to deliver great a great service for your clients.

Want to start using our online scheduling calendars right now?

We’ve opened up testing to any of our subscribers that want to take part. So, if you’d like to start offering online booking to your clients, or you’re interested in replacing a third-party scheduling system with our own, tightly-integrated scheduling system, please get in touch and we’ll let you know how to get involved.

New features for emails sent to your Light Blue account

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Light Blue subscribers are given a unique email address, and any emails sent to your unique email address are automatically imported into your Light Blue account. They appear in the Inbox, and from there you can use them to create a new enquiry or link them to an exist shoot or client. This makes it easy to keep all of your correspondence in one place, so that you can see the full history of your dealings with your clients.

We’re constantly updating Light Blue’s email import features to add new features and support changes in the way that major email clients format their emails, but we wanted to highlight a couple of big changes that have gone live recently.

Attachments are now automatically imported

When an email containing attachments is sent to your Light Blue email address, we now automatically import them for you. Emails up to 10MB in size are supported, and attachments with the following extensions will be imported:

  • .pdf
  • .txt
  • .rtf
  • .docx
  • .doc
  • .xlsx
  • .xls
  • .csv
  • .jpg
  • .jpeg
  • .heic
  • .png

Once you’ve created an enquiry from an incoming email, or linked it to an existing record, you can “promote” any particularly important attachments so that they show up on the Activity panel instead of only being displayed when you view the email. To do that, open the email from the linked record’s Activity panel, select the attachment, and click the “promote” button that appears next to it.

Improved formatting for emails forwarded from macOS or iOS Mail

To get that initial email enquiry into Light Blue, forwarding the email to your Light Blue email address is usually the quickest way to get it into your Inbox so that you can create an enquiry from it. We’ve recently improved the formatting of emails forwarded from the macOS or iOS Mail app, removing the first level of quote marks and making them easier to read.

Sunshine online proofing gallery starts sending orders to Light Blue

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WordPress e-commerce plugin Sunshine has added a direct link to Light Blue’s API, allowing photographers who are using Sunshine’s online proofing and ordering galleries to have their client orders sent directly to their Light Blue account.

The Light Blue API allows our subscribers to send information straight to their Inbox from a variety of sources, including online forms, booking systems, and online galleries. Orders sent from Sunshine to your Light Blue account will appear in the Inbox, and from there you can import them into Light Blue as a new order, saving you from needing to manually re-enter print orders while keeping all of your sales and invoicing information together in Light Blue.

Sunshine’s Light Blue API link add-on is available from their website. Light Blue users will need an active subscription to be able to use it, and you can find more information about our API in our knowledgebase.

New online invoice and email features

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We’ve made some small changes to the way that Light Blue’s online invoices and emails work. We’ll be announcing some big new features in the coming weeks but these changes have been made now so that we can start beta testing those other new features.

Online invoices

Our online invoice receipt emails now include a link to view the paid invoice online, rather than including a copy of the invoice in the email itself. There are two main reasons for this change: it works better with a wider range of email clients; and it also protects your clients’ privacy if they’re using an email provider that scrapes the contents of their emails for information.

We’ve also changed the information that’s displayed when your client views a paid invoice. Instead of just displaying your “thanks for paying this invoice” message, we’re displaying all of the details of the invoice so that your client can refer back to it or print it for their records.

Client portal emails

The other new feature that you’ll notice is that copies of emails that are sent for Light Blue’s contact forms, questionnaires, contracts, and online invoices are now recorded in Light Blue’s Outbox and the Activity panel for the relevant records. We’re still CCing a copy of these emails to you so that you get an instant notification when your client has done something, but this gives you a clearer record of all of your communications with your client.

Feedback

As always, we’d love to hear from you if you’ve got any feedback about our new features. And if you’re on our list of beta testers, expect to hear more from us in the coming weeks 🙂

New contact form features

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We’re constantly improving Light Blue’s features, even when we’re very busy helping our customers to deal with the effects of the pandemic and lockdown.

We’re working on some big new features that we’ll be announcing soon, but we’ve added some new features to Light Blue’s contact forms that have gone live today.

The most obvious change is that we’ve added reCAPTCHA to our arsenal of anti-bot tools. Our contact forms have always included effective anti-spam protections, but it never hurts to add more and reCAPTCHA’s popularity and ease of use will be reassuring to both you and your clients.

Most of our subscribers are using the HTML code that Light Blue automatically generates to embed our contact forms into their websites. If you’re using the embed code that we provide then it will automatically resize your forms to accommodate the reCAPTCHA widget. If you’ve modified the embed code to set the height of the embedded form manually though, you’ll need to check whether the form still fits and adjust the height in your embed code. If you need any help with this, get in touch and we’d be delighted to assist.

One other change that you’ll notice is that if you’ve set up an autoresponder for your contact form, we’re no longer including the data that your client entered into their enquiry in the email that we’re sending to them. You’ll still see what they’ve written in the notification email that we send to you though, and of course it will still appear in Light Blue’s Inbox so that you can convert it into a new enquiry with the click of a button.

The notification email that we send you when a client submits a form (whether that’s a contact form or a questionnaire that you’ve sent to a client) has been reformatted, too. The new design makes it much easier to read the information that you’ve been sent if you’ve got any long field headings.

Using Light Blue to manage multiple brands

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We know that a lot of photographers run multiple brands under one business. Maybe you shoot both weddings and newborn photography, or you have a separate website for corporate photography. With Light Blue you can run all these brands in a single account.*

This is really handy for a lot of people because, while they may have different websites and logos for the different types of shoots they are doing, they’re still running one business.

You can run as many different brands as you like with Light Blue. Our custom branding means that you can change the logos, colours, and fonts on the emails, forms, contracts, and online invoices that you send to customers.

Setting up your different brands is really easy. You have probably already set up your main brand already if you are using our online services. Log in to your account on the Light Blue website and select the client portal section. Got to the branding area, then run through each section to choose your fonts, header images, background colours and form styling for each of your brands.

You can also apply your branding to the invoices, quotes, and receipts that you print (or PDF) from Light Blue. As well as your main branding (which you set up in the “Printing” section of the Preferences window), you can use separate branding for any of your shoot types. To do that, go into the “Shoot Types” section of the Preferences window and upload a different background PDF.

*Important point: Light Blue is designed to run a single business, but you can use shoot types with their own branding to essentially split up your income into different categories. One of the big advantages of this approach is that you have a single client database, and everything is nice and simple to manage. However, when it comes to things like the built-in reports, we assume that you’re running a single legal entity (e.g. a single limited company) because that’s what the vast majority of our customers need.

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) support added to Light Blue

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tl;dr: we’ve taken care of this so that you don’t need to do anything.

On 14 September 2019, new regulations are being introduced across Europe to protect people using cards to pay for goods and services online. These new regulations are called Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and will add a requirement for two-factor authentication for many online payments.

The requirement for two-factor authentication means that affected transactions will require something in addition to the card number. Details will vary between card providers, but they might include codes generated by your online banking app, a security dongle, etc.

If you’re using our popular online contract signing or online invoice payment services and accepting card payments from your clients via our Stripe integration, you will be affected by SCA. However, we have already made all of the necessary changes and there is nothing that you need to do. Your clients won’t notice anything different: they’ll still be able to pay you quickly and easily by card.

If you’re not already using our online contract signing and invoice payment services, we’d be delighted to show you why photographers give us so much great feedback about them. Our customers love how easy these services make it for their clients to confirm a booking or pay an invoice.

You can find out more about our online contract signing service in this video tutorial, while this tutorial shows you how to go about publishing invoices for payment online. If you need any help getting started with these services (or with any other aspect of using Light Blue) get in touch with us and we’d be delighted to provide you with one-to-one help via a screen-sharing session.