Tis’ the season! Many photographers are in full swing with family, Santa, or other holiday portrait sessions. PhotoBiz can help support your seasonal photos and future mini sessions. 

In this article, we’ll cover how to set up a form for mini sessions, set up your scheduler for events, and how to use marketing tools to promote what you offer during this holiday season.

Setting up mini-session forms

Mini-sessions are a great way to photograph a high volume of clients in a short period of time. To help you collect registrations and plan out your mini-sessions we built a mini-session form template. 

Learn how to set up a mini-session sign up form »

Creating mini sessions is easy in the PhotoBiz Form Builder, in fact, we have a mini session template that you can choose from right from the start. Just select this new type and then you can modify the settings from there.

Modifying the form template is easy. Here are a few tips:

• The dates and times are editable. You can add more times in the advanced settings. You’ll need to set the availability of each time to 1 (so that only 1 person can sign up for that time slot).

• Explore the advanced settings. You can set up forms to collect registrations for mini-sessions on multiple days on a single form. Once you get everything set up for one day, duplicate that field and update the date (and times, if they are different).  

• Use conditional fields. To keep forms simple and personalized to your clients' needs, you can set up conditional fields to display based on the answers to previous questions. These fields are similar to choose your own adventure books. For example, you can have a question with Yes/No answers and if the answer is Yes then new questions may appear, but if the answer is no, nothing changes on the form (or vice versa).
  Learn how to add conditional form fields » 

• Sell add-on options. With the help of a radio or checkbox block, you can have your clients select and pay for add-ons while they sign up for a mini session.
  Learn how to accept payments through a form »

• Test your form. After you personalize the form, make sure to test, test, test. Look at details like when you select a date, do the times available for that day reveal themselves. If you run into a challenge, our support team is here to help.

Forms are a very versatile tool. You can make them do a lot of heavy lifting to collect information from your clients including contact details, digital signatures, payments, and much more. 

Check out the video below to learn more about setting up a form for a mini sessions.

Scheduler for holiday events

Did you know you can use the PhotoBiz Scheduler to book your holiday photography sessions? You can create a digital calendar to share with your customers and encourage them to book a session. You choose when you are available and can collect payment while people secure a time with you. You can even set up add-on options for your clients to select from (think hair, make-up, special props, or backgrounds).

To allow people to book holiday sessions, you’ll want to set up a new service.

Learn how to set up a new service for the Scheduler »

Tip: If you want to offer holiday sessions on specific days and times of the week, you can set up a limited schedule in place of your regular hours of operation. 

Learn how to set up a limited schedule »

You can also take follow-ups and reminder emails off your to-do list by setting up email automation tied to the Scheduler. Check out this article, about creative ways you can use email automation for your business. 

You can use the automated emails to remind people about their upcoming appointments, and then once their shoot is over, you can set them up to remind people to view and purchase pictures, send a promotional email featuring a coupon, or even a request to review you.

Marketing your business for holidays

Once you have your holiday mini sessions or events set up, now it’s time to market them! You can create email campaigns to alert leads, share the opportunities on your social media channels, and even have sticky or pop-up banners to inform customers on your website.

Start from one of our templates, or design your own email from scratch, the choice is yours. You can really have fun showing off your Photoshop skills to design some engaging graphics for your emails. 

The key to emails is including a clear call to action and keeping people engaged. For example, once you send an email you can watch the metrics (including opens and click-throughs). Then you can follow up with people who click on a link in the email but didn’t convert (or make a purchase) to see if they are still interested.

Learn how to create a marketing email campaign »

Promotional banners & pop-ups

Creating a festive promo banner or pop-up is much like an email but even easier. They are a great tool to get people’s attention about events and promotions. You can use one of our premade designs, or create your own. Plus, you choose where they appear, how often they appear, and can set an expiration date so it will automatically turn off.

Explore tips for holiday pop-ups and sticky banners »

Learn how to set up pop-ups and promo bars »

Rule of thumb: Promo or sticky banners are great for long-term notifications, pop-ups are best for attention-grabbing in the short term. 

Check out the MasterClass Video below, for more details on how to market on your website and set up email marketing campaigns and promotional sticky banners.

Set up Email Automation to make payments more hands-off

The opportunities are endless for how you can use email automation. We talked about automating emails with the Scheduler tool, but you can also automate much more.

My favorite email type is the abandoned cart email for private proofing galleries. If a customer is in the process of buying but steps away before purchasing, you can set up an email to remind them to complete their purchase. It helps ensure they get what they want in a timely manner and helps you get paid too. Maybe you can even sweeten the deal with a coupon to encourage them to make the purchase. Once you get it set up, the automated emails will keep triggering and save you time.

You can also set up automated emails for invoices. Sometimes people need a little reminder to pay their bills. Email automation can send those reminders for you.

We hope you have a great holiday sales season and that these tips will help you.

If you have more questions about holiday marketing, check out our Holiday Tips site for ways you can score big during the holiday season, including inspiration and freebies! 

Need help setting up your holiday promotions? Our support team is just a phone call or chat away. Give our team a call at 866.463.7620 or log in and live chat with us.