[Video Walkthrough] All About Clients

INTRO: WHAT IS A CLIENT

Before we get into the specifics, let’s first talk about what a CLIENT is! A Client is an individual or company that you are either currently contracted to do business with or have done business with in the past.  

CREATING CLIENTS MANUALLY (00:26)

Look in the left navigation bar and you will see CONTACTS, and CLIENTS.  On the top right-hand side of the module you’ll see there is an [Actions] button.  This functions just like it did with the LEADS module where you can add a full Client manually or add a quick Client which only adds minimal information to the system.  If you need a refresher on how this is done, please refer to our Class 101: All About Leads video where we walk you through all the steps!  

You’ll notice that the only real difference between a Lead’s information and a Client’s information is that you won’t see any Event data fields.  This is because each Client will hopefully eventually have many Events connected to their Client profile!  

To save time, let’s view an already created Client together!  I’m going to click on a Client’s name in this listing and it will take me to that Client’s profile.  First, I’d like to draw your attention to the tabs across the top of the module.  You’ll see as you keep using pixifi that it’s navigation is very uniform with each module functioning pretty similarly to one another.  Up at the top you have the [VIEW/EDIT] toggle button along with the [Actions] button, and your left navigation bar hasn’t changed at all.  Right now we’re on the View Info tab, and here you can see at a glance all of your client’s basic information.

Pixifi offers something pretty cool in that this organizational software isn’t only intended for your convenience as a studio, but is also designed to create the maximum personalized experience for your Clients.  Clients can interact with their Pixifi profile in a number of ways including filling out Questionnaires, viewing/paying Invoices and signing Contracts, etc. Perhaps the coolest part yet is that they each have their own individualized Client portal which provides them a convenient way to access all of their information.  We will go more in depth with all of this later on, but we wanted to draw your attention to this while we are in this section because your Clients can update all of their information on their own through their portal access.  This ensures you always have the most relevant information for your Clients without you having to remember to make those changes for them!  You can set these Client changes to be approved automatically or to be reviewed and approved by you as the changes are requested.  By default, we have all changes to Client information set for manual approval by you as a safeguard so that your Clients don’t accidentally erase all of their information in your system.  If you trust your Clients not to goof on this stuff or prefer to take your chances for the sake of time saved, you can switch this to “auto approve changes."

IMPORTING CLIENTS MANUALLY (02:55)

Again, if you haven’t watched video Class 101: All About Leads, now would be the time to go back and do that.  Importing Clients and all of their information is the exact same process as importing Leads which we have already discussed at length in our last video.  We thought it was worth mentioning that you can import Clients the exact same way, but for the sake of time, we recommend you check out that -> video as we move on to how to deal with duplicate Clients here.

MERGING DUPLICATE CLIENTS (03:20)

Sometimes a duplicate Client sneaks into your system (either by being added manually, through a manual import process, or by a previous Client of yours booking an Event with you through a Booking Page (we’ll get into Booking Pages later) and now you have two Client records of the same person.  If this ever happens, you can also merge existing Clients into one contact one of two ways.  

The first way is by selecting your multiple clients and then selecting [Batch Update] and merging them, but the way we recommend merging clients as you’re learning is by clicking on the CONTACTS tab in your left navigation bar, selecting CLIENTS and then “ACTIONS" and “MERGE CLIENTS" which will take you to the MERGE CLIENTS tool.  Here you can type to search any two clients within your system by name and click [COMPARE DATA] which will trigger a pop up window with all of the information from both of these existing Clients.  It is here that you can select which info from each record you want to be merged to Create a new merged Client record.  All of the Events, Invoices, Contracts, Proposals, Tasks, Documents, etc from both Clients will be merged together under the brand new Client record.

CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS (04:29)

In Pixifi, each Client record has up to four contacts.  If that’s not enough, you can add Client relationships to your client’s record.  The purposes of this feature are many:  A wedding photographer may choose to add many family members to this record for contact people on that day of the event or to contact after the Event for product sales or thank-you gifts, etc.  A portrait photographer may use this feature to add the names, ages, and birthdays of a family’s children or extended family member’s names and email addresses for yearly family portraits, etc.  The possibilities are endless!

CLIENT CUSTOM FIELDS (05:02)

If you find that there are data points you’d like to create about your Clients that aren’t included in our typical fields, you can create your own!  Let’s say you love to ask them their favorite candy and favorite genre of movie as part of your Questionnaires but you don’t want to refer to that Questionnaire every time you need that information!  This way, when you go to create your movie date night gift package for your Client as a thank you gift, you can pull that information up quickly right from their profile!

So, let’s take a look at how to do that now.  When you go to CONTACTS, CLIENTS, you’ll see a tab for Custom Fields.  It’s important to remember when adding custom fields that these new fields will apply to ALL the Clients within the filters you provide.  So, if you only want to add the custom fields to Clients within one of your brands, you would need to select which brand before adding and then click [+ Add Custom Field].  Likewise, if you only wanted these custom fields for your Wedding Clients, you would filter as such before clicking [+ Add Custom Field].  Keep in mind, if you ever change a Client’s “Client Type" from one type to another, the custom fields you added will also change and drop any data that was previously input within the old Client type.

TRACKING SPECIAL DATES (06:12)

Within each Client profile there is a birthday field and an anniversary field.  When you view a Client’s profile you can access this information quickly by going up to the [VIEW/EDIT] toggle button at the top right and then viewing the fields. But let’s say for instance you wanted to see all September Birthdays to plan a mail-out coupon or a mass email or maybe send an Anniversary Session Credit to all of your past May wedding clients; you can do all of that from within this mini-module.  You can also export all of your special dates into an excel spreadsheet with all the necessary information readily available for a mail-merge.

CLOSING REMARKS (06:46)

Thank you for taking the time to learn all about CLIENTS.  In this video, we covered what a Client is, how to create Clients manually, import Clients, and merge duplicate Clients.  We also learned about Client relationships, custom fields, and how to track special dates!  If you’re feeling extra studious and ready to tackle CLIENTS more in depth, please check out the EXTRA CREDIT section for this video where you will learn about the Client portal setup and login, all about Client categories, filtering Clients, setting Client defaults, and how to batch e-mail your Clients!  

If you’d prefer to move on to the next lesson, check out Class 103: All About Events.  

EXTRA CREDIT FOR CLASS 102: ALL ABOUT CLIENTS

Welcome to extra Credit for “ALL about Clients."  All of the things we are going to cover in this video aren’t required to function within the CLIENTS module, but if you learn how to implement them, you’ll be managing your Clients like a boss!

We already mentioned the Client Portal in Class 102: All About Clients, but we will dive into the nitty gritty here; how to give them access, how to login, how they can set up their own username and password so you don’t have to set it up for each Client and more!

First, we are going to show you what the Client Portal looks like from the Client’s perspective.  On your left navigation, click SETTINGS, then BRANDS, then select your brand (if you have multiple brands).  Once in this module, you will land within the General tab where you will see a Custom URL.  When you click either of these links, you will be taken to the Client Portal Login Screen, specific to that brand.  (We’ll show you how to add your brand image in Class 403: Brands and Email Set-Up).  

You’ll see that this portal looks similar to what we see on the admin section.  From within this portal, your Clients can view their information (and make changes), see their Event information, view or print their Contract, view their Invoices (and make payments), view or answer their Questionnaires, access links to their pictures, and find any documents you may have shared with them via their portal.  Now that you’ve seen what this looks like for them, we are going to show you how to set it up for them and give them access to it!

It all begins with a magical E-mail template!  But before I show you how to create this, I should tell you why we should create a template.  As with many other functions that you will be performing on a daily or many-times-daily basis, you could either perform the task manually, or create an automated process!  In this specific instance, if you wanted to grant your Client portal access without a template, you would have to manually create a username and password for every single Client and then proceed to write out an email to them, explaining what this information is and how to log into this portal site.  Let’s just say this takes you 10 minutes for every Client you do this for and you have, on average, 100 Clients a year.  This is 16.7 HOURS of unnecessarily wasted time that you could have spent playing Yahtzee!  So, instead of wasting 83.5 hours of your life over the next five years setting up individual Client portals, let’s learn how to automate it!

CREATING E-MAIL TEMPLATES (DETOUR) (02:27)

First, let’s decide where in the process you want to give them this access.  Some people give it on the Thank-You email when a Client signs a contract and makes their retainer payment.  Others will set up an Event reminder that sends out portal access instructions at other specified times in their custom client experience.  The choice is up to you.  

To create our first email template, click on TEMPLATES on your left nav bar and select E-mail Templates.  Once inside the module, click [Create New Template].  In this template, first you’ll need to choose a type.  In this example, we are going to choose “Contracts" as the type because we’re going to set this template up to go out to our Clients upon contract signing!  We will also name the template and choose a subject/header.  

Within the body of the message, you can type out anything you want to show up in an email to your Clients when explaining their Client portal access to them.  To create a template but still include personalization, you can select any variables/tokens for the message by using the drop down box whenever you are ready to insert that information; anything that appears within those curly braces or curly brackets (those funny looking parentheses) will be replaced with data pulled from your Client information fields.  To give them the ability to create their own username and password I am going to use the {Client Portal Setup URL} as the variable/token, and to send them to the external link to the login page we just saw, I will select the {Client Portal Login URL} variable/token.  So, an email that looks like this on your end (and can be sent to anyone and auto-populated with their corresponding data) would look like this to your specific Client when received in their email.  So, even though this template took a few minutes to set up, it can be used for hundreds of Clients over the course of many years and will save you HOURS, even weeks, months, and years of your time.

Extra Credit: Client Categories (04:18)

Client categories act as a tag so you can filter Clients however you’d like to see them.  Each Client can be categorized into multiple categories as well.  For example, a Wedding Client from 2010 may also be categorized as a 2013 Newborn Client and also a Family Client in multiple years.  Why is this helpful to you?  This sounds like a lot of extra work…  Well, we are going to tell you why it’s worth taking a second to assign categories.  

Your database is one of your most valuable tools within your company.  To list a few things, the information found within it can revolutionize your processes, help you keep track of your trends, and provide you with a go-to base of people who don’t have to be convinced that your work is awesome and worth investing in!  These people could be potential repeat Clients or even become walking billboards for your business as you keep bringing yourself to the forefront of their minds.  But in order to harness the power and versatility of your database, you need to organize it so that you can analyze it.  Client categories are just another way Pixifi helps you do that!

As we mentioned before, here is no limit to how you can categorize your Clients.  Some people will create categories by year and/or event type (Weddings, 2013, Engagement, Portrait)  This way you can analyze, filter for batch emailing, analytics to track for areas of growth or weakness, etc based on what their goal is for that database interaction.  For example, let’s say it’s 2020 and you want to see all of your 2015 Wedding Clients so you can send out “Happy 5 Year Anniversary" emails with special coupons or product credits.  If you hadn’t taken the time to categorize those Clients you would have no way to go through and find a list of those Clients in order to do that.  

Having a functional database like this for new event promotions, special offers, or even just reaching out to share blog posts they may be interested in (at their venue or including flowers from their florist, etc).  All of these little things continue to keep you at the forefront of their minds for word of mouth referrals, social media shares in their circles, etc.  If you haven’t read the book “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us" by Seth Godin, do it!  The bottom line is that these people you have previously done business with have already “drank your kool-aid" so to speak.  They’ve already enjoyed the amazing images and remarkable experience you have worked so hard to create for your brand; they don’t need convincing that you are awesome and that other people should hire you!  So, subtly remind them to sing your praises to the people around them; or better yet, hire you again!  

HOW TO:
Now that you know how powerful of a tool a functional database is, we are going to walk you through how to create Client categories and how to filter them.  From within the main CLIENTS module which you can get to through CONTACTS and then Clients, you will see this tab called “Categories."  When you click [+Add New Category] you’ll be able to create the Category name and choose a color as well. Then Click [√ SAVE] and you’re good to go!  Now that you’ve created this Category we are going to show you how to apply it to more than one Client at once (called Batching), and then we’ll show you how to do it manually on an individual Client.  

So right now we are going to click on that Clients tab and you’ll see these check boxes along the left side of each Client’s name.  For this example I am going to check off 3 of them.  Now on the right side you’ll see a [Batch Update Clients] button where we can select an action and apply it to all checked Clients.  Now click on “Assign Categories" and we can check off whichever categories you’d like to apply to these 3 clients you have selected.  Click [√ Batch Update] to save the changes and you’ll see the different color coded categories listed within each Client record.

Let’s click on one of the Clients in the listing and view their profile.  Over on the right you’ll see this “Categories" section.  Just click on [+ Add] and there is a drop-down menu where you can choose one of your categories or you can click on the [+] (plus) button and create a new Category right from here without having to go back to the categories listing.  Once you’ve chosen it, click [√ Save] and you’re good to go.

Extra Credit: Filtering Clients (08:19)

Now that we have categorized your Clients, let’s learn how to filter them to see the information useful to you.  At the top left of the CLIENTS module, you’ll see this [Filter Options] button.  This interface should feel familiar to you because it functions similarly to any filterable database like iTunes Library, Spotify playlists, or even something as simple as your contacts app on your phone!  You can click on [Filter Options] on the top of your screen and the filter options panel will slide out from the right showing you all the different criteria you can use to filter your Clients.  The little red X’s you see above each filter option will clear out that options value and refresh the listing almost like hitting “clear" on a calculator.  And then for filter options, where you see the blue check mark, you have to click that to refresh the listing with the values you just entered.  Now that you have filtered your listing, you can close the filter options panel with the top red X and begin batch editing and organizing your Clients from the newly filtered list.

Extra Credit: Client Defaults (Account settings) (09:20)

As you are creating clients and events you will begin to find that it could be useful to develop some default settings.  Let’s show you how to set them up:  Go to SETTINGS, Application, and then scroll down to Client Options.  Here we can set-up the default Client type (wedding or non-wedding which can be changed later but defaults to save you time).  You can have custom Client ID numbers that will auto increment every time you add a new Client.  You can automatically apply Client categories that will be auto-selected when you go to create a new Client.  You can also set up a default City, State, or Province as well in case you do a lot of Clients in the same area.  DON’T FORGET TO CLICK [UPDATE]!

Extra Credit: Batch E-mailing Clients (10:03)

There are times when you want to send a bulk email to 20 or less people.  If you want to do that then using the check boxes to batch update will work perfectly.

BUT say you want to email blast hundreds of people.  This would be way too cumbersome because you can only view 20 at a time.  So what we recommend is using one of our external integrations with Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, Mad Mimi, or iContact and do all of your bulk emailing through them.  To create an email list with one of the vendors we just mentioned, You will want to categorize your Clients like we mentioned in the previous section.  Once you’ve done that, you can go up to the [Actions] button and down to export Clients.  You’ll see the typical export to spreadsheets buttons but then you will also see these other buttons to export to your preferred bulk emailing vendor.  In this example, we will just click [Export to MailChimp]  You can choose the Client category you want to create as a list and then choose an existing MailChimp list to add to.  If you haven’t created a MailChimp list, just do that through their interface and then come back and refresh your Pixifi page.  

Thank you for taking the extra time to explore this extra credit section!  We hope that these little extra tools and tips help you to acquire the skills and confidence to continue killin’ it!