6 ways photographers can start using automation (2021)

Adding automation to your photography business could be just what you need to generate business growth. and automation allows for the freeing up of time and resources helping you, as a photographer, to focus on your craft. Here are 6 ways Photographers can start using Automation (2021).

1. Email Automation: MailChimp 

MailChimp is great for acquiring new leads and for building relationships with existing and new customers. Through MailChimp, you can email a range of unique offers to clients within your mailing list. 

The great thing about 

MailChimp is its personalisation and testing ability. You can make your emails completely personalised and reflective of your brand. You can also A/B tests in different email strategies which are used to see what your customer base responds best to. 

2. Management of Tasks: Trello 

Organisation is a key aspect of business growth and success, a great way to implement automation into your management of tasks is through Trello.

The main benefit of Trello is its cross-platform syndication. Trello can be accessed through any device and is available on Google and Apple stores.

For your photography business this is great, allowing you to keep up to date and on top of tasks wherever and whenever. 

3. Managing your Schedule: Calendly

Professional photography is often a life of going from event to event. Caldendly allows you to organise events and allows clients to schedule events with you. 

As a business platform, it goes one step further offering; calendar integration (enabling you to connect to Google, Office, a

nd Outlook calendars), website embed (allowing customers to schedule from your website directly) and integration w

ith existing services (such as Salesforce, zoom and GotoMeeting and more).

4. Inbound Marketing: HubSpot

Within photography, gaining new customers online can often seem tedious and daunting. HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales software that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close custom

ers.

 HubSpot offers, the ability to host web and landing pages, create blogs and email sequences and manage interactions with your leads and customers.

HubSpot takes it one step further, with the ability to analyse the success of campaigns and track user behaviour. 

5. Payment processing: Shoeboxed 

Shoeboxed is an automation tool that focuses on providing a receipt digitization service.

For your photography business, this involves sending an envelope full of receipts and other documents and sending them to Shoeboxed.

Key features Shoeboxed offers are as follows; paperless organisation, searchable receipt repository, mobile expense tracker, automatic receipt archiving, online contacts database, digitized tax preparation, and easy reporting.

6. CRM Website Plug-In: ChatBot

Chatbot is a customer support service that pops up on the face of your website. It simulates human messaging and is of similar format to instant messaging, providing responses to customers based on a combination of predefined scrips and machine learning applications.

The benefits of Chatbot are its ability to offer 24-hour customer service, it can give your photography business a face with the ability to add a photo of yourself or any other imagery to the Chatbot.

Chatbot further allows for cross-integration of software platforms - connecting data to other CRM platforms such as mail chimp, with the ability to add data directly to Excel spreadsheets. 

Automation product ratings:

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In conclusion, it is important to keep automation simple. We recommend, only picking 1 or 2 of the automation tools and techniques we have recommended. This allows you to take the time to learn how to use each tool effectively, giving the opportunity for the individual testing of each tool.  

Implementing automation can help you to focus on your craft while trusting that your photography business is still growing and hitting goals through automation tools. Allowing you as a photographer to stay present in capturing the moment.

And there you have it 6 ways Photographers can start using Automation in 2021.