[Video Walkthrough] All about Brands & Email Setup

INTRO: Nobody likes SPAM®!

In this lesson, you will learn how to set up your Brand Settings as well as focusing on setting up your E-Mail account within Pixifi so that any time an email is sent to anyone through Pixifi, it is coming directly from your email provider, rather than from our server.  Because this eliminates the third party server, your email is much less likely to get flagged as “spam," making it much more likely to end up in front of your client upon first contact.   This should be really good news to you because let’s face it.  Nobody likes spam!

BRAND SET-UP (00:40)

Every reputable business has to have a distinct brand!  Brands are what define us and set us apart from everyone else, and consistent branding can even speak volumes for the professionalism of any business.  Most of us understand this concept, but many people don’t know that there have been studies that show that the average person must perceive a brand about seven times before they begin to trust it!  Oh my gosh, right?  How on earth can we make that happen with a brand new Lead?  Pixifi has found many ways to help you incorporate your branding into many aspects of your various processes because we know how crucial it is to get your brand in front of the eyes of your Leads, Clients, and even other Vendors!  

To set up your brand, go to SETTINGS, BRANDS, and choose the brand you wish to edit.  (If you are using one of our lower-level memberships, you will only have one brand to choose from).  One of the first things you can do to customize your Pixifi experience to reflect your unique brand is to change your custom URL, or what your client sees when they are interacting with their Client Portal, one of your Questionnaires, Contracts, Booking Pages, etc.  The next very important thing you will want to add is your Brand Logo Image!  This will be displayed at the top of your Contracts, Invoices, Booking Pages, Questionnaires, and almost any other time they’re interacting with you via Pixifi.  Another important thing we recommend you take the time to do is add a Branded E-Mail Signature down here in your “E-Mail Signature" section.

So let’s think about this!  You have a prospective Client who stumbled across a gorgeous image from one of your events that had your little brand logo watermarked in the corner (1).  They went to your facebook business page and saw your brand again in your Profile image or on your Cover photo (2).  While there, they found a link to your website where they obviously saw your brand again on your website (3), and then they started checking out your Pixifi Pricing Page and saw your brand again at the top of the page! (4)  Now let’s say they surfed around your website a little more and decided to fill out your inquiry form.  10 seconds later their phone *dings* because they just got an automated E-mail reply from your studio, with a beautifully branded E-mail Signature at the bottom! (5)  There’s a link in the E-Mail that prompts them to fill out a quick Questionnaire about themselves and their Event where they see your Brand at the top of the page, yet again!  (6)  In just the last 3 minutes, thanks to Pixifi,  they have already seen your brand SIX TIMES!  Not too shabby, right?  And we haven’t even sent them a proposal, a contract, an invoice, or anything yet AND we’re talking about someone who just found you for the first time on facebook!  As we all know, many of our leads have already seen our work/brand or heard about us from someone they trust!  Just think about how many times Pixifi helps you get your branding in front of those types of people?  Along with the quality of your work and the level of your service, consistent and professional branding is one of the biggest contributing factors in your ability to charge what you’re worth!  

E-MAIL SET-UP (03:45)

Follow me to your brand settings located under SETTINGS, BRANDS, and then select which brand you would like to start with if you’re a Essential or Studio Pro plan holder and you have a few.  You will end up on the “General" tab, but if you scan over to the right, you’ll see a tab labeled “Custom SMTP."  When you set your own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) settings here, all e-mails from this brand will no longer be sent from Pixifi's SMTP mail host, but will instead be sent from your own email provider’s mail host.  As we explained above, this should increase the chances of your email being delivered to their inbox instead of to their spam folder.

Under the SMTP tab you’ll see this “Common Providers" section.  This is intended to be a time-saver, allowing Pixifi to pre-populate the settings Pixifi needs when you are using one of our most common email providers!  This does not mean your email has to be from one of these providers!  I’m going to select Gmail in this example.  When I select Gmail, the host, port, and security type have been selected for you and have prepopulated in the required fields.  Also, this little blue info section has popped down for Gmail because Google no longer accepts your regular Gmail password for this setup process.  When using any of our other Common Providers listed, this next step won’t apply, but since Gmail is so popular, I’m going to walk you through this next step.

In this little blue window, you see that Gmail requires that you enable a very specific two-step verification process for your protection.  For the first step, you will want to have your phone handy.  Click on the first link you see here and you will be taken to Google where they explain the need for a process like this.  When you click [Get Started], you will be asked to sign into your account again and then tell Google which phone number to text your verification code to and click “TRY IT."  Once you receive this text (or call), enter that code into the Confirm Code field and it will tell you that it worked, asking you if you’d like to turn it on.  It will let you know that you have successfully completed your 2-step verification and the only thing you have left to do is set up an app-specific password!  To do this, go back to our email setup screen and click on the second link in our little blue window.  From here, you will select “How To Generate an App Password," and click on “Visit Your App Passwords Page."  You will be redirected to a new page where you will click on the drop-down [Select App] and choose “Other (custom name)" and now you can create a name for your new app-password like “Pixifi E-mail."  After you do this, a 12 character password will generate and you can copy it, go back to our Pixifi email setup page and paste it into the password field.  We always recommend you click the [Test Settings Before Saving] button so you can see if there is an issue before saving.  If you get the green light, click [√ Save]!  And you’re set!  

EMAIL SYNC (06:41)

The next super cool feature we are going to show you is the Email Sync!  This feature, when enabled, will pull any emails received from or sent to that person into Pixifi and they will all appear within your Contact Tab under each Lead or Client. This way you can keep track of all of your correspondence with all of your Contacts in one place!  
When you input your settings into these fields, you’ll want to make sure you input the correct settings from your Email Provider. Our E-mail sync uses IMAP as the technology, so be sure that when you look at the Incoming settings, that you choose the right host and port for IMAP and not for POP3 as some Email providers have separate settings for both IMAP and POP3.

One final caution we want to bring to your attention!  When your emails are pulled into Pixifi, they are essentially live streaming from your inbox.  If you delete any of these emails from within your actual email account, they will also be removed from Pixifi, as it is view-only!  

CLOSING REMARKS (07:40)

Class dismissed!  We hope you had fun learning all about Brand Set-Up and Email Setup as well as our Email Sync feature!