Understanding your customers is vital when it comes to selling. By figuring out their buying habits, communications preferences, and monitoring their interactions with your brand, you can better understand their needs and if you’re meeting their expectations.

Contact tools or Customer Relationship Managers (CRM) help you collect and store this data digitally. PhotoBiz’s website and studio management platform comes with a contact tool that allows you to store customer and lead interactions, organize contact lists, collect extra data, and have one-on-one conversations. It’s a powerful tool.

In this article, I’ll explain how the PhotoBiz Contacts tool works, how to use tags to organize your contacts, and how our conversation feature allows you to store important information.

The PhotoBiz Contacts tool is your digital Rolodex! It collects data received through and records interactions with your website. Here are a few examples of what actions gets tracked: 

• Form completions

• Online purchases

• Appointments scheduled 

• Blog comments

• Comments, likes, favorites, and purchases in a Proofing event

• Conversations between you and your client (using the conversations tool)

• Email preferences (subscribes or opt-ins, unsubscribes, bounces if they had any automated reminder sent to them) 

This data is collected for each person who interacts with your website, and a profile or contact record is created for them in the Contacts tool in your PhotoBiz account. An email address is required to create a contact record and anytime that email address is used by someone interacting with your website, their contact record gets updated. 

You can collect and store a lot more than an email address for each contact. When people complete a purchase, information such as their name, address, phone number, etc. also gets collected. And a record of the purchase is noted as well.

In addition to your website helping you to collect information to update each contact record, you also have the ability to edit or add more information if you like. This can include relationships, like if you know a customer’s spouse, children, or parents. Lots of little details like this can be stored here to help you learn about your contacts and build relationships with them.

You also have the ability to upload contacts from other CRMs and documents you have. Just upload a CSV file that includes a column for email addresses and our system will create new records or amend records already in your account.

There are also multiple options to organize your contacts. You can choose if a contact record is a lead, customer, or vendor and adjust later if need be (if they make a purchase through your website, our system will automatically make that contact a customer). Plus you can use custom tags to further organize your contacts. Let’s explore how all this works.

Tags are a useful resource for tracking customer interactions on your website. Your website can automatically add tags to contact records based on a number of actions, such as:

• Purchasing a product or service

• Commenting on a blog post

• Completing a form 

• Booking an appointment or event

You have complete control over what tags get added to your contact records based on what actions people take on your website. This can be set up through the tools in your PhotoBiz account. You can use tags with blog posts, Ecommerce products and services, appointment types in the Scheduler, and Forms.

You can even assign tags while uploading a list of contacts. And you can always go to each contact record to add and remove tags manually. 

Once you have tags set up, then you can pull lists of contacts that have the same tag and use those lists to personalize the communications you send to your clients.

Conversations is another unique feature of the PhotoBiz platform. I like to think of it as PhotoBiz’s own instant messenger. Any time you have a conversation with a customer, it is stored in their contact record for easy reference. Once you start a conversation, you can reply directly through your PhotoBiz account or via email. The exchange will be stored in the conversation section of your contact’s record.

Using the PhotoBiz conversation tool can make it easier to track down what you or your customer have said.

If you have a list of customers or leads you want to add to your Contacts tool, you can easily do so by uploading a CSV (comma separated value) file. Many other platforms including Excel and Google Sheets have the ability to generate a CSV file. Simply save that file and then upload it into the Contacts tool in your PhotoBiz account. When you upload the file you can and select the data you want to import, from the available data in the file, such as first name, last name, address, and more.

The piece of data that must be included in every upload is the email address. This is required to generate a new contact as well as check for existing contacts. During the upload process, you will also have the option to select what type of contacts they are (e.g., Leads, Customers, or Vendors), and tag the contacts with one or multiple tags.

Note: You can import 5,000 contacts at a time. If you want to upload more than 5,000 contacts, you’ll need to upload multiple CSV files (breaking the list into groups of less than 5,000 contacts each).

Downloading a list of contacts is super easy. You can export your entire list or a list of specifically tagged customers. This comes in handy for marketing or creating your own spreadsheets. Our system will generate a CSV file with all the data you have collected like addresses, phone numbers, and emails for each contact record. 

The only information that is not downloadable is data unique to PhotoBiz, like conversations, purchases, likes, and comments.

Note: While contact record downloads don’t include purchase information, you can download purchase and sales reports from the Ecommerce section of the PhotoBiz platform.

The tools that take advantage of your contact lists the most are in the Marketing section of the PhotoBiz platform. 

Based on your tags and how your contacts are set up, you can create unique lists that you can send email marketing campaigns too.

You can follow up with people who completed an interest form about weddings to let them know you are attending a bridal show, you can follow up with people who purchased a particular product to let them know about a coupon or similar item you think they’d like. You can even create funnels by sending follow up emails based on people’s interactions with previous emails.

Say you send an email to 1,500 people and 209 people click on a link in that email, You can click on the data tracked and download the contacts as a CSV file.

Then you can reupload that file and assign a tag to that group of contacts such as “clicked X email”.

Then you can send a follow up email to those contacts, creating a richer experience for people who seem interested in what you are offering, instead of re-sending an email to everyone on your list.

The PhotoBiz Contacts tool makes learning about and connecting with your customers easier than ever. You can collect and store data to learn about your customers and use it to engage your customers and leads all from one place. 

Need help setting up your tools to make your contact list more effective? Give our team a call at 866.463.7620 or log in to live chat with us.