Spring mini-sessions are just around the corner!
Or maybe you’re planning for some Summer minis. Or perhaps you’re really pre-planning and putting together ideas for Fall minis; imagine that level of proactive planning!
Mini sessions can be a powerhouse business strategy for you as a photographer. They offer a trifecta of benefits:
- Affordability for clients
- Efficiency in planning and shooting time
- A boost in client volume
If you’ve ever planned a mini-session promotion, you know the importance of systems. Systems are the silent gears that keep the machine running smoothly; they’re what transform chaos into order, complexity into simplicity, and stress into serenity.
There are 5 systems you need to be successful with mini-sessions.
In fact – I’d argue that these systems are foundational to your entire business, whether you’re running a mini-session campaign or otherwise.
- Marketing system – How people hear about your mini-sessions.
- Scheduling system – How clients pick a date and time for their mini-session.
- Booking system – How clients pay and sign a contract for their mini-sessions.
- Organization system – How you stay organized with all your mini-sessions.
- Client-experience system – How you give your clients an amazing experience at scale.
Fortunately, you can do all of this in Sprout Studio – an all-in-one system to help you spend more time doing what you love and less time doing the things you don’t love.
Your mini-session marketing system
Your marketing system is how people hear about your mini-sessions.
There are dozens of ways you could market your mini-session campaign, but no matter how you’re marketing your mini-sessions (ads, partnerships, organic social media, trade shows, etc.), you’ll need a place to organize your inquiries if you don’t want to drive traffic directly to your sales page.
Collecting your inquiries as Leads in Sprout Studio helps you keep things organized and streamlined. That way, you can send emails, questionnaires, etc., all automatically via Sprout Workflows, set the Lead Source so you know where your best clients come from and even specify why someone doesn’t book you when you close the Lead so you can learn from experience.
A lot of photographers will market their mini-session campaigns to existing clients. Email marketing is a great tactic for this, and fortunately, you can do that in Sprout, too!
You can build an Email Campaign with as many emails as you’d like, dripped out, bit by bit. You can bring in only certain clients (i.e. you may not want to market Spring minis to business portrait clients) so only the right people get your messages.
Your emails in Sprout are gorgeous, too, with many pre-built templates. The Designer Email drag-and-drop editor is simple to use, and you can design the most stunning emails in minutes, no coding required!
With Email Lists in Sprout Studio, you can build a Signup Form and have it pop up on your website, too. That way, you can quickly grab the attention of visitors to your website and get them to sign up for your email campaign, too!
Marketing can be simple when you have a system to help you execute your vision!
Your mini-session scheduling system
Your scheduling system is how clients pick a date and time for their mini-session.
When you’re booking many sessions at a time on the same date (which is what you do mini-sessions), it’s crucial to have an easy way for clients to book a time. You shouldn’t be emailing back and forth, confirming times and crossing them off a spreadsheet manually.
You can use Schedulers in Sprout Studio as a part of your Booking Page (more on that later) so your client can pick a date and time that you have available for your mini-session. Once a client picks a date and time and pays, other clients cannot pick it, so it automatically means you don’t double-book and keep things super simple for both you and your clients.
Of course, you have all the control, too. You can add buffers (maybe you need 15 minutes to reset between clients), set a maximum # of bookings (we all have a limit) and even set up your Schedulers to book one of many photographers that shoot for you.
Your mini-session booking system
Your booking system is how clients pay and sign a contract for their mini-sessions.
You must make it quick, easy, understandable and simple. They need to choose a package, get you their contact information, sign your contract and pay. Don’t waste time trying to track that all manually or give confusing instructions such as how to send Venmo payments or to set up an e-transfer. Keep it simple and make it easy for your clients to do business with you and book you.
Sprout Studio’s Booking Proposals (for 1-off clients) and Booking Pages (for multi-clients and mini-sessions) let you do that. It’s a private webpage that guides your clients through booking you as their photographer. They can:
- Choose a package
- Pick add-ons to customize their own package
- Fill out their contact information
- Answer a questionnaire (optional)
- Sign a contract
- Pay you
Your mini-session organization system
Your organization system is how you stay organized with all your mini-sessions.
Once a client books you, how do you know? Weeks after they’ve booked, how are you staying organized? As you prepare for their session and your day of mini-sessions, how do you know who booked what time, what their preferences are, the names of their kids, etc?
You need a system to stay organized and keep yourself sane. Otherwise, you’ll get overwhelmed, make mistakes, and not be able to show up on the day of your mini-sessions the way you want to.
With Sprout Studio, you keep your unbooked jobs (Leads) and booked and paid jobs (Shoots) organized. You can use statuses to organize them further and know where everyone is at. Each Shoot has everything in one place for that Shoot for you – their questionnaires, uploaded documents you may need, contact information, client details, dates and times, and more.
In Sprout Studio, when you use a Booking Page, you can also see all the Shoots that were booked from that Booking Page in one place. That way, you stay hyper-organized for the day of your sessions.
You can view a “Daily Agenda” for each day, too, which is incredibly helpful and built specifically for mini-session success. It gives you a list of all of your sessions on that day, with quick access to:
- Their session time
- The Client details
- Their orders
- Their contract
- Uploaded files
- Questionnaires
… and so much more.
Your mini-session client-experience system
Your client-experience system is how you give your clients an amazing experience at scale.
When you’re booking mini-sessions and photographing multiple clients in a short window, it’s non-negotiable to give a great experience without needing to keep up with all the moving pieces manually. Automation is your best friend, so you should be streamlining your workflow by putting things on auto-pilot. This allows you to Focus on being creative while the repetitive, monotonous work is handled seamlessly behind the scenes.
Workflows in Sprout are incredibly powerful. It’s never been easier to design a remarkable experience for your clients and put it on autopilot. Sprout Workflows lets you deliver surprise and delight each time without all the manual work.
Here’s a video deep-dive on how to design a remarkable client experience and build it in Sprout.
When you build a client-experience system, you do the work once and then can deliver that experience repeatedly. That’s the secret sauce to successfully running a mini-session campaign and taking advantage of the scalability of mini-sessions. You must be efficient in all that you do, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice the quality of your client experience. Sprout Studio can help.
The key to successful mini sessions as a photographer
Mini sessions can be a great – and profitable – business model for you as a photographer. It allows you to give your clients affordability while also keeping things efficient for you as the photographer. Plus, they give you a nice uptick in new clients quickly.
Mini-sessions can then build upon themselves for further iterations.
Make sure you have the 5 systems installed in your business before you start with mini-sessions.
- Marketing system – How people hear about your mini-sessions.
- Scheduling system – How clients pick a date and time for their mini-session.
- Booking system – How clients pay and sign a contract for their mini-sessions.
- Organization system – How you stay organized with all your mini-sessions.
- Client-experience system – How you give your clients an amazing experience at scale.
And if you’re looking for 1 system to help you do all of them, we have a free trial with Sprout Studio, and we’d love to have you check it out!
