Product Archives - Page 3 of 3

Customer Cart Experience

First impressions matter. When it comes to customer cart experience, we understand that less is more (unless ice cream is involved). The last thing you want is for a customer to become overwhelmed and leave the cart confused without making a purchase. Building your cart in a way that clearly communicates your products is not a one size fits all situation. Here at Fotomerchant, design your customer cart to work for your offerings. Don’t build a maze but rather a signposted road that leads all the way to the place order button. *insert cha-ching sound*

Let me show you! Keep reading to experience a generic example of how our customer cart format can look.

Cart Experience Walkthrough

Every good story needs a hero; enter Jack Largeman

BING! Jack’s parents just received a gallery notification email. Mum and Grandma received the email, and Grandma is eternally grateful that this studio entered her email as an additional one.

The simple but effective email links Jack’s Mum straight to her cart by clicking a button. This button will contain a direct link to Jack’s cart, so Mum doesn’t have to scramble through her mailbox or handbag to find that pesky access code.

Once the button is clicked, Mum will first be shown an ID gate. This ID gate asks for the user name, email, and whether the customer wants to opt-in to additional marketing. Gathering the user email and name is essential as this information allows us to reference Mum’s name in future marketing. If she passes this link to anyone else in the family, we will also have their email address through the data collected at this ID gate. The opt-in checkbox allows customers to opt-out of marketing if they please, and they will receive no abandoned cart or promotional marketing in the future.

At this point, Mum is greeted with a pop-up. You can customize this pop-up with whatever graphic or text you would like. For example, notify your customers of any current promotions or important and relevant information like free shipping.

Once Mum enters the cart, create a customer-friendly experience by arranging your products and packages in a way that intrigues but doesn’t overwhelm your customer. We have many different customizable options that can be implemented to guide your customer through the cart.

See the below image to view our countdown banner, additional subject feature, promotional highlight, and menu bar. These three features are juicy blog posts in their own right and highly benefit your customer cart experience. To give you a high-level overview of our shopping cart, we will revisit these features in greater detail in future posts. For now, I want you to focus on the cart layout and how Mum can easily find her desired photograph of Jack through the screen’s handy menu bar on the right-hand side.

We have learned some tricks by tracking thousands of customers through their shopping carts. One to note is graphics matter. Outlining the products in your packages through simple bullet-point lists is effective, but nothing does the trick like visually seeing your prints. Provide a visual representation of what exists in your package through a complete graphic takeover, or a combo of a bullet-point list with accompanying graphic. Start out with our generic silhouette graphics, or provide your own. The sky’s the limit!

Scroll/swipe to see more examples of how your products can be presented in the cart:

I could talk for days about how these shopping carts can differ depending on your studio needs. Everything from highlighting promotional products to graphics utilized, you can really make this cart your own. Rather than rambling on, why don’t I just show you how one of our studios has designed its cart! Swipe to view:

Well, there you have it. No studio is the same, so each shopping cart is different. We understand how other jobs may require alternate shopping cart layouts. At Fotomerchant, you can have multiple cart setups depending on your photography job. Build your cart in a way that works for you and your clients. Reach out if you want a demo tour and see this shiny shopping cart in action.

Session Templates

Better. Faster. What do we mean by this? Here at Fotomerchant, we are focused on streamlining and improving your studio workflow. One way we do this is by templating your different job types. By speeding up your workflow and removing the potential for human error, session templates save you time and money.

Before introducing you to the dazzling session template feature, let’s get acquainted with sessions. Sessions are what you may refer to as a job. A session is an event where you photograph individuals; this could be a sport, school, or graduation event. These sessions consist of stages that allow your customer to move through a specific cart experience tied to durations or particular dates. We can template stage structures and any specific tax or shipping settings you may need to be linked to a session.

How Session Templates Make Your Life Easier

As your photography season starts picking up, the last thing you need is for an easily avoided mistake to stop your flow. Building stage structures and assigning shipping and tax settings for your session every time you import a job is time-consuming and results in human error. Why painstakingly create each job when you can simply duplicate it from a premade template!

Let nothing stop your workflow as you refer back to your session template and create new jobs with this structure already in place, a process so easy you could even delegate it to other team members. Woah, what if you want to track which session templates your team uses? No worries! You can easily view which session templates are utilized for your jobs using the handy “review usage” feature.

Do you need to tweak session settings for each job that may diverge from your session template? No problem; you can adjust the job as needed after creating your new sessions from the session template.

At Fotomerchant, we understand that each job may need different stage structures, e.g., you may shoot prepay for your dance schools but only proof for your soccer teams; this would require multiple types of session templates, which you can set up. Depending on the job type, select the correct session template to ensure your tax, shipping, and other fiddly settings aren’t forgotten in the mid-season swarm of jobs. Create your new session, and presto, the category-specific stage structure, and all necessary settings are in place!

Within the hectic mid-season period, promotional marketing can sometimes fall through the cracks as you prioritize getting your photos out to buyers. Don’t worry; we got your back. Session templates help bring marketing back into your workflow as our session templates can include promotional campaigns linked to stages within your sessions. The marketing is already incorporated when you create new sessions using the template! So sit back, relax, and discover the sweet feeling of surprise sales generated by previously forgotten promotions. Our session templates can include both stage durations and specific dates so you can perfectly time your promotional campaigns. Marketing without the work? Yes, please! Click here to learn more about marketing linked to stage types.

User Stories

When thinking about a user story to introduce you to the capabilities of session templates, I had one studio in mind, Strawbridge Studios. On a large scale, this studio cannot afford to create a new session structure every time a job comes online. It would be chaos! The thought of all the human error and late deadlines met makes me cringe. Thankfully for Strawbridge, session templates were here to make their workflow better and faster. Here is what Strawbridge had to say about the use of this feature:

The session template feature allows specific settings and stages to be applied to thousands of sessions at a time. Marketing campaigns can be executed without the need for manual manipulation, which eliminates the high risk of human error.

Strawbridge Studios

This studio has a long list of session templates they choose depending on the type of job, pre-pay, spec, seniors, proof only, sports, if you can name it, they got it! Life without session templates for this studio would be strenuous and complicated. It gives me a headache just imagining it! Lucky for everyone involved, session templates alleviate some of the mid-season stress. Don’t just take it from me; let Strawbridge tell you:

Within our eCommerce department, session templates have become our entire workflow. Without them, our job would take a lot more time to complete, and we would experience a higher rate of human error. We would not be able to manage the volume of our company or the diversity of our offerings without them.

Strawbridge Studios

Well, you heard them! Session templates have become so instrumental in Strawbridge’s workflow that they couldn’t imagine life without it. So streamline your workflow with session templates and never look back. Reach out to our friendly Fotomerchant team to learn how we can transform your studio workflow.

The Opt-In Feature

Man, oh man, collecting customer data seems to be getting trickier by the day! One of the most resounding comments we hear from studios is that schools feel uncomfortable providing student emails. So how on earth are you meant to let parents know their images are ready in this scenario? Here comes our opt-in feature to save the day!

Our opt-in feature collects information in a user-friendly form that will help you match your images to customers and, in turn, collect those sweet customer emails.

Why Opt-In is Useful

Thanks to our easy-to-set-up opt-in pages, you can now provide schools and event organizers a direct link to disperse to relevant parents & event participants. When emails are unattainable, parents and event-goers can voluntarily opt-in by filling out a simple form. Once the emails are obtained, the skies the limit as you can market to customers previously out of reach.

The link provided to parents and event-goers by the school or event organizers is unique to each session, meaning you can tweak the opt-in form depending on the type of job you are photographing. You can easily find your unique opt-in link in the session details

Our opt-in feature is customizable to how you would like it to function for your personal use case.

Do you want the opt-in turned on for only a week? You can choose to leave the opt-in turned on for as long as you would like.
Want your opt-in portal to be accessible on your home page? We can implement this faster than you can say, “this opt-in feature rules!”
Want to collect information about the dog’s name for photo day? We can absolutely account for Patches the dog to be roll-called! This is one of the best aspects of opt-in; format the data points required by your studio to allow for easier matching to the subject photographed.

On that note, let me introduce you to a fantastic user story where opt-in is implemented.

User Story

Like all good stories, this one begins with lots of dogs. One of our studios specializes in photographing dog daycare events, and yes, the photos are unbearably cute. This studio required a customizable opt-in form to match the images to their dog parents. In addition, they needed a form that captured both human and dog names while allowing multiple event participants to be added (the more dogs, the better!).

This studio had the event organizer send out the unique opt-in link, which brought the dog parents to a simple and easy to interpret web page form. After filling in the form, they were subscribed. Yipee! The studio could now see the subscribers pile in.

After the cute dog photos were imported, the studio was quickly able to match the subscriber information to the images using our matching feature. Our clever system of pre-filling matches sped up this process using the data provided. So, no more endless scrolling to find names.

This user case is slightly different from photographing humans, as the studio can make their dog galleries public. Cute dog pics for everyone, yay! The opt-in page was also made public to allow day-of standbys to opt into buying dog pictures as well. This, of course, can be hidden from your homepage if your situation requires it. We can also limit the time frame for subscribers to opt-in by linking the form to a durational stage.

We are all about customization here at Fotomerchant. Make opt-in do the work for you in a way that works for your studio.

Email Marketing

So how will the subscribers know their images are now online? When you are ready, and your subscribers are matched, all you need to do is click a button. I wish everything in life was solved with the press of a button! The triggered email has a direct button link straight to the customer cart and includes a photograph of the subject in the header image to help encourage click rates.

One of the significant aspects of having subscribers opt-in is capturing customers’ emails you would not usually be able to harness. In addition, we can export these subscriber emails and use them for future marketing promotions and last chance gallery reminders. So snap up those extra emails and create a marketable database.

From customizable forms to customer marketing, the opt-in feature is a universe of its own. Filling the gap between you and your customers, the feature allows you to get your photographs out there while avoiding the usual blockades. With the swish of a simple link sent via your schools and event organizers, gain access to parents, students, sports players, graduates, doggy parents, and any other living creature who wants a photograph. Reach out today to find out how our opt-in feature can make your studio’s workflow better, faster, and a lot easier.

Split-Testing

All good things in life are defined in terms of comparison. Pizza vs. salad, the beach vs. a parking lot, Apple vs. Android (I’ll let you decide the winner of that battle 😉). How do you know what tickles your fancy without at least testing other options? This, my friends, is why split-testing is crucial to your marketing plan. Stop pumping out email campaigns willy-nilly and start experimenting, testing, and comparing whether your marketing is doing what you intend.

So get out your beakers, test tubes, and white lab coats, and let’s start experimenting.

Split-testing? Huh?

What is split testing? Great question. Split testing, otherwise known as A/B testing, is a way to learn how you should market to your customers by testing different email variations against each other. Think of this as your gladiator colosseum, where we battle to find the sleekest, most alluring marketing plan through whatever means necessary, without all the gore.

Have you ever wondered whether your customers prefer a cheeky headline message or a straightforward call to action? No? Well, let me tell you why you should. In a world where our digital mailboxes are cluttered every day with deals, promos, and the occasional interesting email, first impressions matter. Your email marketing needs to understand what clicks with your customer base and, in turn, provokes them to click on the place order button. The only way to uncover this is to compare email marketing tactics in mini-experiments.

Every good scientist knows that to conduct an experiment, you first need a control, a point of reference to begin. So you first set up a control email and then change one thing you want to test in a variation email. Then, you send both these emails out simultaneously and compare the results. The most crucial part of split testing is to have a clear intention of what you are testing. For example, if you want to test the subject line of an email and whether changing the format improves open rates, only change this one element. If you were to change the email copy in your variation, you will never truly know whether the text change or subject line change helped improve customer engagement.

The example above highlights two different subject lines.

Variation A: 🍀 Fotomerchant’s March Newsletter 🍀

Variation B: 📰 [Newsletter] Fotomerchant’s March Happenings

Man, that sounds like a lot of planning and work! Well, I have good news for you; the Fotomerchant marketing team has an array of split tests ready to test on your customer base. So sit back, and let us do the experimenting for you. In case you were wondering, pigeon mail is the clear loser to sending an email. How do we know? We split tested it. It turns out pigeons are major divas, too hard to work with.

How will split-testing benefit you?

As your email campaigns end, the split test has run its course, and we are left with data as precious as gold. This data can enlighten us on how best to market to your specific customer base for future email campaigns. As much as a gut feeling is important, actual hard data backing your marketing strategy is how we roll here at Fotomerchant.

A customer shopping for dance images will undoubtedly be drawn in differently from those shopping for graduation photos. Or will they? You will never know unless you split test it! If your studio shoots multiple types of events, this makes for some fascinating split tests. Don’t target your different events in the same manner ever again! Market with precision and confidence only created through testing, testing, and, you guessed it, more testing.

Split-testing and seasonal marketing.

Does a seasonal marketing plan with split-testing built-in sound too good to be true? At Fotomerchant, we use data to inform our marketing plans; this is all the more reason to opt into our seasonal marketing; generate revenue and learn more about your customer base at the same time. So once Christmas rolls around, we can see what button size, header images, and subject lines are best at reeling in those sweet customer conversions.

Split-testing and gallery notification emails.

We have talked about marketing promotions, but what about your run-of-the-mill gallery notification emails? Testing these notification emails is just as important! We can set up your marketing workflow so that a winner is chosen after a certain period of time, and the winning email is automatically sent as the generic campaign. No fiddling around; the marketing platform takes the reins and chooses the clear winner based on the data generated. You can even select what is determined as a winner: conversion, click, or open rates. We want clear winners when it comes to split testing; that means no participation awards. Instead, we want to know what works and use that method going forward.

We can’t wait to see all the goodies that lie within your data. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the revelations made through split-testing. So don’t hold back any longer. Develop a well-rounded understanding of your customer base and stop stabbing in the dark with your marketing. Fotomerchant is holding the flashlight; we just need to switch it on.

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.

Conversational Support

This article is extending further on the recent webinar:

Customer Success through Better & Faster Support

We’re all used to the process of searching for a support number online or sending an email into the ether in the hope that someone will receive it and respond with a fix-all solution to our query. But what if this process was different? What if you could send off a quick message to support just like you’d send a text to a friend?

We’ve been pioneering a new way of handling support for the last few years, and I’d love to share some details with you.

Deli Counter Support

Let’s be honest; no one really enjoys it when they need to contact support. It typically means something isn’t working as expected, and now you’re left frustrated and needing help. Unfortunately, a standard support model we like to call “deli-counter” support has formed. This type of support model requires you to “take a ticket” and wait in some kind of queue until you are called upon and your issue or question can be addressed. The timeframe for a resolution in this scenario is not usually speedy. And while this type of model can be effective for certain situations, we’ve discovered that it is not the best solution. So we decided to make it better.

A New Way to Support

Customer happiness is one of our top priorities. We want you to feel your needs are being addressed efficiently. This is why we’ve made the process of submitting a support request as easy as messaging a friend by using Slack, and as a bonus, you may even get a few laughs in return, you know, like a random photo of a wizard because that’s just how our support rolls. In addition, this conversational approach to our support structure has provided more transparency between you and our support team, allowing us to build and maintain more meaningful relationships.

“A lot of support chats are automated, so the automated responses send you to a knowledge base article, and sometimes there’s an infinite loop. When you eventually get to a human, it’s just infuriating.” – Tearah (07:14-07:39)

We don’t think you should have to message an automated system to reach our support team like Tearah mentions above because it further delays your problem being resolved or your question being answered. We know your time is valuable, and getting stuck in an infinite loop isn’t our idea of fun either. With our new approach, you can easily message our support team, and we can quickly identify the problem and provide more frequent updates while working towards a solution. Doing this has alleviated many of the delays with the more traditional support model.

“We don’t require that same traditional email escalation model. So often, the person who’s let you know, I’ve seen you, is the person who comes back and finishes it.” – Tearah (09:08-09:21)

As difficult as it is for you to wade through multiple emails, it is just as difficult for us to remain up to date on how a request is proceeding and what steps have already been taken when relying solely on email communication. Reviewing previous messages in a single area has reduced the potential for errors when providing status updates and allowed us to respond in a more timely manner. We can also quickly bring in other support team members to help expedite those trickier problems that can sometimes arise. But we can do so without the headache of missing email trails or confusing email chains that even that wizard couldn’t decipher.

“We’re very invested in knowing the challenges of the industry and of a studio because that’s how we push our products, platforms, and our support to be better.” – Tearah (25:06-25:15)

Most importantly, Fotomerchant is built on the things you wanted, and our conversational support model has given us a better opportunity for advancements in product development. You can send us your spur-of-the-moment ideas anytime. Whereas, before, we likely wouldn’t have received those ideas because submitting an email or official request via a ticketing system is much more time-consuming, especially when these ideas don’t typically surface during the traditional 9-to-5. Making it convenient for you to get your ideas to us has allowed us to make many of the updates you are enjoying right now.

Moving Forward

Completely restructuring our support to accommodate a faster way to communicate with you has boosted our rapport and helped us create unique business relationships and friendships. But we’re not done yet. While we’ve seen significant improvements, we are always looking to make things better and faster. So keep those wizard hats on and send us your brilliant ideas anytime. They’re always welcome in our mind palace, and we’re always here.

support

Subject Image Added Event Trigger

When it comes to marketing to customers, you may shy away from expanding beyond a manually sent “Your Images are Online” alert due to the complexity of setting up triggered email campaigns, or worse, fear of accidentally triggering an email before the images are ready. While potentially valid depending on the service you’re using, this decision can drastically reduce your potential income. Think of it this way, when you send out a single email alerting customers that their images are online, your entire profits for that shoot are based on that one email. If the email is triggered too early, the impression customers receive isn’t the greatest. There has to be a better way to market images, and we’re happy to say we’ve created it.

Fotomerchant now offers a streamlined workflow to let your customers know their images are online that leaves less room for error and gives you the ability to automatically send emails each time images are added into the gallery. How did we do it? We created the Subject Image Added Event Trigger that allows you to preload subject data without triggering emails to customers.

How does it work?

Simply preload subject data into a session at any time, and until the images of the subject are uploaded, no emails will send out to parents. When the images are added, the email will be triggered once within a 12 hour period to help eliminate spamming and provide you with the ability to make quick adjustments without triggering additional emails. The trigger can be used in conjunction with other scheduled campaigns as well, so you’ll never have to miss an opportunity to market your images.

Here’s an example use case for seniors:

Let’s say you receive subject data in late June. You can create the sessions within your account and preload this data.
You take the senior’s photos at the school in mid-July.
You upload the retouched images into their gallery a short time after the shoot, and the trigger sends an alert to the customers letting them know their images are online.
You take additional photos of the same senior outdoors in August.
You upload the retouched outdoor images into their gallery, and another trigger is sent to the customers letting them know new images have been added into their gallery for purchase.

This allows you to focus on the shoot, retouching the images, uploading the gallery, and provides you peace of mind that the customer will be alerted each time their gallery is updated with new photos.

In a nutshell, the trigger takes out all the back and forth often needed when setting up email campaigns and streamlines your workflow. You now preload data once and know emails will be triggered when you add new images. As a result, sales are not missed or delayed, parents are excited to get emails, and you can spend more time doing what you do best: getting more clients and taking epic photos.

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