Relationships are key. They can help you build and maintain your business.

As you get to know your customers and leads, you can track and record information that will help you identify who is hiring you for your services and buying your products. Keeping up with all that information can feel like you need to carry around a notepad or spreadsheet. But in the digital age, better tools exist, including the PhotoBiz Contacts tool. It makes organizing information about your contacts easy.

The PhotoBiz Contacts tool is a CRM or Customer Relationship Manager. It tracks if someone makes a purchase or books a service with you, as well as likes or comments on anything on your blog or proofing gallery. It stores the information that you acquire via forms, and gives you the ability to assign tags (labels or categories) to organize contacts. You can even add relationships between contacts to track friends and family data. Plus, you can add information to contact records via bulk uploads or manually to individual records. This data can help you better understand your contacts.

In short, the Contacts tool is a digital directory of who’s-who. You can use it to create email lists for targeted campaigns. And you can do it all effortlessly and without the assistance of third-party tools. There is no need to feed information into another CRM or pay for extra tools. The PhotoBiz Contacts tool is inside every PhotoBiz 9 account, and it works seamlessly with all the tools within the PhotoBiz platform.

Want to know more about the Contacts tool? Great! That's why we made this comprehensive guide. We want to help you understand what the tool can do and how you can use it for your business's benefit. Let’s dive in!

The biggest benefit of the PhotoBiz Contacts tool is keeping a record of each interaction your customer has on your site. Some contact records may be as basic as an email address, obtained say via a newsletter sign-up form. That’s a great place to start. As a contact continues to interact with your site using the same email address, more information will automatically get added to their contact record. This can include shipping and billing addresses from online purchases, birthday and wedding anniversaries and social media accounts from online forms, and much more. You can also round out your contact records by adding your own details and notes as you interact with people. 

All of the information you gather through comments, form submissions, scheduler appointments, purchases, and more helps you learn about your contacts!

A history of your customers' payment data is stored in the PhotoBiz Contacts tool as well. It makes it easy to track down a history of online purchases, invoice statuses, contracts, and more. 

Another benefit exclusive to PhotoBiz is our built-in Conversations feature. It is part of the Contacts tool. 

What does Conversations do? It allows you to send private one-on-one communications directly to your contacts. Think of it as PhotoBiz Direct Messages or a DM. You can start a new conversation directly from a contact’s record and they will receive an email notification and the option to respond. The two of you can view the full conversation at any time and continue to reply back and forth.

A new conversation is also started when a user comments on a photo in a Proofing gallery. You’ll receive an email notification with the photo attached so you can reply. 

By using conversations to communicate with your contacts, all your customer communications are stored in one safe and secure place!

Another feature of the PhotoBiz Contacts tool is tags. Tags are great for organizing your contacts. 

You can add tags directly to contact records, or you can set up products, services, blog posts, and forms to automatically add tags to contact records. For example, if a blog post has a “fine art” tag on it and someone leaves a comment, their contact record will receive a “fine art” tag as well. This is very helpful for developing targeted email marketing lists as it can help you send relevant information to your contacts.

Not every one of your contacts needs to receive every one of your communications. Use tagging to segment your contacts and plan targeted communications.

Keep your contact management simple by storing and managing your contacts all in one place, the PhotoBiz Contacts tool. If you use spreadsheets or a third-party CRM or marketing software to keep track of your contacts, you can load that information into the PhotoBiz Contacts tool as a CSV file and put those other tools aside. You can import contacts in CSV files with up to 5,000 contacts per file.

Note: There must be an email attached to a user for it to be imported. The email field is required.

When you import a list of contacts, you can organize them with tags such as lead, customer, vendor, or other custom tags. Each contact record can have multiple tags, but they must be labeled as a lead, customer, or vendor. If a lead or vendor makes a purchase on your website, they will automatically become a customer. 

To add tags to contact records in bulk, you may also find it helpful to upload CSV files with existing contacts (must have the same email address as the existing contact record). This can come in handy when conducting remarketing campaigns based on past activities. 

Another nice feature in Contacts is email automation tracking. This allows you to see what automated emails a contact has received. If a customer says “I didn’t get an email about that,” and you know they should have received an automated email, you can check to see if they did (or not). Just click the email automation tab in a contact’s record to view the email details.

PhotoBiz’s Contacts tool is an ever-growing asset to your business. It is a comprehensive tool for tracking data about your customers, leads, and vendors. We hope this guide helps you understand how you can use this tool to manage your business from communications to appointments, to transaction history. 

Check out these additional articles about the Contacts tool:

• 7 Features PhotoBiz Customers Love
• How to Build Relationships With Your Clients Using the PhotoBiz Contacts Tool
• 3 Ways to Use Tags to Make Your Website a Better Sales Tool

And check out our support articles and videos to help you learn how to use the PhotoBiz platform. 

Need an extra hand? Give us a call at 866.463.7620 or live chat with our team (existing customers, please log in before starting a live chat). We’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have about the PhotoBiz platform.