Marketing Types Linked to Stages

Sometimes as I struggle to fall asleep, I dream of an email marketing plan triggered by the progress of a photoshoot’s specific workflow. The thought of such a feature that can be templated and easily re-instated is the only thing that can soothe me on a cold winter’s night.

Thankfully, I no longer need to dream about this feature; such mystical powers now exist here at Fotomerchant. I’d love to share how you, too, can rest easy with our new capabilities to trigger marketing campaigns via stages in your sessions.

Good things come to those who are informed.

Woah, easy there. Before we begin, let’s get you up to speed on what I mean when I say session or stage.

We Fotomerchant folk refer to a session as any job you may have where you photograph individuals; this could be a specific event, grade at a school, or sports team’s big debut.

Within this session, you will have stages where you can tweak what your shopping cart will offer to customers depending on the date or duration. Here is where the marketing magic starts to happen; these stages can trigger your marketing! Yes, you read that correctly, and no, you aren’t the only person sweating with excitement.

Marketing triggered by dates or durations.

Let’s get to the juicy bits; I want to tell you all about stage-triggered email promotions.

As your customers move through the stages in your session, you may want to offer different promotions depending on where they are in the workflow. Say it’s the third week your session is active, you are feeling generous, and you want to offer 30% for all products, but only to non-buyers. I see you trying to get your customers back in the cart with some discounted goodies dangling about 😉. Here at Fotomerchant, we are very keen to help support you in your marketing endeavors. We will set up your session to run through its usual state of the norm; then, after a three-week duration, an email will be triggered linked to the stage offering this discount! And yes, this email will only go to non-buyers who need a reminder to buy more cute pictures of their son Jimmy.

Say goodbye to human error, guessing, and counting. Who wants to do math anyway?! No more timing your shopping cart stage to your scheduled promotion; the stage change triggers your emails. When your promotion has successfully run its course, we will schedule the cart to return to its usual price points, ready for the next promotion.

Hang on! We have only talked about durations; what about triggering email promotions for specific dates? We absolutely can do this. Imagine it is almost Christmas, the memory of too much eggnog last year has left your thoughts, and you’re ready for more. Meanwhile, Jimmy’s desperately writing to Santa for a 5×7 picture of himself to hang on the mantle. I agree; it is in the Christmas spirit to make Jimmy’s dreams come true by offering his parents free shipping on any orders made after the 10th of December (leaving plenty of time for the Christmas elves to print, pack and send out the order). When December 10th rolls around, and the stage in Jimmy’s parent’s session flips over to the set date you determined previously, an email will be sent with the promotion. Isn’t that cool?

A templated marketing plan.

Let me tell you a little secret about how we easily manage to implement these campaigns triggered by sessions across your account. Remember those sessions I mentioned earlier? We can template the stages for specific session types; we call these session templates. So you can create a marketing plan, all triggered by stages changing, into a template easily duplicated when you add new sessions to your account. Let’s not keep this a secret between us any longer; I want to scream it from the rooftops! Your automated marketing plan is templatable!

Before each season, you can reevaluate what marketing you would like to push, and, working with us friendly Fotomerchant folk, we can set this template up for you. The link between email campaigns to stages via the use of campaign tags is something we pride ourselves on implementing for you, giving you more time to focus on the things that matter for your studio or that new eggnog recipe.

The beauty of these session templates is that you can have multiple versions. For example, say you have a client on board who is… sensitive… to their students/sports players/event-goers being targeted with promotional content. Ouch, yes, that hurts, but you know we got you covered. When creating a session for this client, you can choose a session template that only has a selected number of the promotions linked to it, so you can keep that client happy. Yay for satisfied clients!

The convenience of session templates also expands to different category types, so we can template various promotions depending on whether you need a sport/dance/school session created. This means you can implement category-specific email copies geared towards different session types like schools or sports.

Winter is coming…but who cares when your marketing plan is on track.

Picture this, you are sipping on your fresh brew of eggnog, and you suddenly see orders pouring in! How? In your infinite wisdom, you opted into the seasonal promotion we offered earlier in the season and had these marketing stages incorporated into your session templates. The process was so easy that after you created a new session in September, you completely forgot about the Christmas promotions put in place for you. Now that sounds good, doesn’t it?

Click here to learn more about how you can opt into our seasonal marketing as we offer promotions for Easter, Mothers/Fathers Day, Halloween, Christmas, and almost everything in between!

No, that wasn’t a dream; it is reality and a current feature we have here at Fotomerchant. Marketing linked and triggered by stages is a beautiful thing, and I hope you now also see the light. Please reach out if you would like to learn more about how we can make your workflow better and faster.