Sales While You Sleep - Marketing Automation Mastery
This post is part of our Pro Tips series bringing you the best inspiration and information from some of our favorite professional photographers and Pic-Time Ambassadors. Enjoy.
Any good system Saves You Stress, Time, Energy and Money.
And when it comes to maximizing the flow, functionality and fortune of Pic-Time’s ready-to-go marketing automation apps for the store, few do it better than Australian wedding photographer, Rick Liston.
Rick’s perfected his Pic-Time marketing automation system by utilizing several apps per gallery - all triggered at the same time upon gallery release - over the course of a two-year time frame.
And with a Return On Investment (ROI) of some $100 per second for the time it takes to switch on said apps and automations, chances are you’d probably like to know exactly how he does it.
A Fortune in Four Simple Steps
Delivering photo galleries and elevating your service and sales process via automations takes four simple steps:
1. Set up your store
2. Customize and save your automations
3. Create your Gallery Template(s)
4. Sell while you sleep
Easy by name but more involved by nature, it helps to break the process down into these distinct parts and tackle each independently.
Think of them as cogs in a sell-and-serve-while-you-sleep machine - none is as powerful on its own as it is once combined in turn with the others.
Front-Loaded Effort to Easy Street
The process of elevating your client experience and incentivizing more and larger sales takes some initial setting up.
Most effort is at the start and making money while you sleep becomes possible once you’ve done the foundational work to begin with.
It’s a front-loaded effort to easy street but a clear path there nonetheless!
Fortunately, Rick’s done the mental masterminding and real-world testing to figure out just how to get the most from Pic-Time’s marketing automation apps.
And that means you don’t have to.
Step 1: Setting Up Shop
To sell online you need a store.
And the fun bit’s choosing products to offer, who’s going to fulfil orders (one of our 32+ integrated labs worldwide or yourself), and the prices you’re going to charge.
Rick likes to create his own custom products inside Pic-Time and pair them with room view photos of finished products in-situ, similar to the interior setting options offered in Pic-Time Art Galleries.
Doing this helps clients visualize finished printed products and how they scale and look in relation to other recognizable everyday items.
Alternatively, choosing to use any of the built-in products from integrated Pic-Time labs gives photographers and clients the benefit of a real-time product designer that creates visual mockups of products on the spot.
If you need different stores or price lists for your different clients or shoot types, you can create as many price lists as you need, and each can have a mix of custom and / or integrated products.
TIP: When setting up your store products and prices, be sure to calculate your markup carefully and strategically set prices to allow for discounts and special offers provided by automation apps. Pic-Time has two automated pricing presets available to help quickly and easily set prices for you store wide.
Step 2: Customize Marketing Automations
Step two in the sell-and-serve-while-you-sleep process is customizing and saving your chosen marketing automations.
There are more than 25 sales automations available to Pic-Time users and Rick’s worked out the best combination of them specifically for wedding photographers - that can easily be adapted to suit alternative genres.
When thoughtfully created and spaced out across the release and time span of a photo gallery, sales automations are - as Rick describes - a true game-changer for business.
The recommended automation stack and timeline Rick adopts looks like this:
Setting up each app is a methodical process - similar across all - and allows for customization of copy, colors, banners, timings, coupon codes etc. so you can keep branding consistent throughout and set things up to perfectly suit your individual business needs.
Once created and saved, your marketing apps sit together inside your Pic-Time account ready to be applied to galleries as required.
““The only work on my part, after I’ve done the setup, is to turn these [automations] on: click, click, click. Money in the bank.””
Learn more about Pic-Time’s sales automations and how to set them up HERE.
Rick’s Quick Tips On Marketing Apps
ABANDONED CART: If you’re not already using it in every gallery you send - wedding or otherwise - go and switch it on. It’s commonly the most effective sales conversion strategy across the globe for a reason: it’s an absolute no-brainer.
ROLLING PUBLISH: Best part is the auto delayed release of the full gallery, letting your clients enjoy a limited preview first all the while building anticipation. AND the way it visually slashes prices in the store with the baked-in adjustable Early Bird promotion of 20% off. This demonstrates a visual cue of the value on offer and actual dollar amounts being saved.
SEND PRODUCT: Design a custom product like a Thank You card. Send it to your client and encourage them to add it straight to cart and solve their problem of DIY designing or sourcing cards (or other products of your choice) elsewhere.
GENERAL COUPON: Ideal for offering a dollar discount. A general percentage off may not appeal to all client types. Often they want to know the value they’re receiving in terms of cold hard cash and they find it harder to leave ‘money’ behind as opposed to potential savings. Rick offers his wedding clients a $150 credit towards a USB box (that can instead be used for anything in store the client prefers) and a $400 credit towards an album.
ANNIVERSARY GIFT: Use it to help your clients with the common pain point of what to gift their spouse for their one-year wedding anniversary. Rick offers his clients a 20% shop discount.
GALLERY BACKUP: Utilize this and it’s likely to help pay for your entire Pic-Time subscription on its own. Another no-brainer automation to engage. Rick charges $60 annually for the service.
Step 3: Create A Gallery Template
Instead of starting and setting up a new wedding (or other) gallery from scratch every time, Pic-Time provides the ability to create and save custom Gallery Templates to suit each of your shoot and / client types.
Rick has a wedding gallery template that automatically adopts his favorite settings like cover design, scene names, client AI search, download settings and of course, his stack of customized automation apps ready to be toggled on.
““We do not want to be wasting our finite time on this planet repeating the same procedural stuff time and time again.””
By utilizing the power of pre-designed Gallery Templates, Rick further speeds up and streamlines his post-shoot workflow.
And time is money.
Find out more about Gallery Templates here.
Step 4: Make Money While You Sleep
Being able to serve your clients while you sleep and wake up to product orders placed through the night is a possibility for all Pic-Time users.
Rick’s proof of it and he promises with the proper set up and system in place, you can achieve the same.
““I absolutely love this software and you can do the same things I do and get the same results.””
If you’d like help getting your own Pic-Time marketing automation system correctly and quickly in place, head to Wedding Workflows where Rick and his team of trained Virtual Assistants will get you going today.
More Pro Tips & Inspiration
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Six Figures From Free Portrait Sessions - With Jeremy Cowart
