Posts Tagged ‘Studio Management Software’
P1Wired just added a new feature to the Category and SubCategory drop-downs on the Add\Edit Customer window. P1Wired created this feature to simplify the set up associated with new customer data. Currently in P1Wired, when you want to add new customer codes, you go to the setup option, find the tab you are looking for and add your new codes. We realized this may be too many steps in a photographer’s workflow.
Simple and Easy — with this new feature, just click on the Category combobox, the first value will be [Add New]. Go ahead and select [Add New] and up pops the Add\Edit Category window. Just add the new code and press the save button, your code gets added and applied to the customer you are adding.
This new feature should be a big time saver and allow the photographer to add a new code on the fly. This was a great suggestion from one of our users and we will be adding this functionality to all the combo boxes in our next release — scheduled for July 2010.
With the most recent release, P1Wired developers focused on some major new features and a bunch of Nice-to-Haves to improve a photographer’s workflow. In our the last blog post we listed four new N-to-Hs — we will list the balance below:
1. P1Wired added auto capitalize to the software. The photographer will notice this feature in the Setup area and also in all aspects of customer/contact sections.
2. P1Wired has further refined the ability to add a customer “on the fly” as a result of adding a new appointment. Jump into the add/edit appointment form and select the Add Customer button. Key in the new customer information and select save — the customer is added to your customer file and also to the new appointment.
3. P1Wired has reworked the look and feel of the software application. We have continued to simplify the look and increase the size of the buttons. The goal is to make the software application as intuitive as possible and let the photographer get started immediately without a lot of setup.
The next release will be out in July. Check us out on July 20th at 2:00 pm EST at the PPA Studio Management Software Webinar for photographers. P1Wired will be providing the PPA community a first hand look at the software and the Simple and Easy approach to managing your photography business.
P1Wired developers added a Quick Entry feature to the order form. This new feature makes it simple and easy to add items to an order.
Simply put in your item code, description, quantity and pose and the item gets added to the order. This new feature allows you to key in a 10 image order in less than 60 seconds.
If you have products or services set up with barcodes, P1Wired also supports a barcode scanner. This is an effective measure to increase workflow efficiencies and reduce key punch error. One site worth looking at is Barcodes Inc. to review the products and opportunties currently available in this space.
We like MailChimp a lot at P1wired, Photography Studio Management Software, because they have a great product and are very creative.
A recent blog post titled “Using Facebook To Keep The Conversation Going” had some interesting ideas about using Facebook for marketing.
MailChimp sent out an email to a certain set of their customer base to let them know they were going to receive the same service for a better price.
They were going to attach SWYN icons but didn’t think it would get much traction. They thought about using Twitter but didn’t think asking their customer base to tweet about the cost savings matched their culture. They thought the twitter email template was overkill for the task at hand.
They ultimately decided to use Facebook. They added a simple line of text linked to their Facebook fan (like) page and asked their customer base to leave a note about what they would do with the cost savings. “It’s basically just an old-fashioned invitation to reply (but on Facebook instead of via email), and continue the conversation with us.” There were many tangible benefits which Ben outlines in his post. Take a quick look at his approach and the results.
Simple and Easy. What an effective way to keep the dialogue going.
Here at PhotoOne Software we’ve just moved our email promotion tracking over to P1Wired Photography Studio Management. We had been using PhotoOne’s internal email feature for our promotional campaigns. We used PhotoOne’s internal email because it was tightly integrated with our prospect list. The one shortcoming was that we didn’t get any feedback on our promotions. We had no idea who opened it.
We then started using Constant Contact because it captured this valuable information. The downside of using Constant Contact was that there was no easy way to get our prospect list out of PhotoOne and into Constant Contact.
So here’s the solution for campaign management. First run a simple query in P1Wired Photography Studio Management. The query will tag the prospect and then you can click on the button “Send to MailChimp.” P1Wired pops up a prospect list set up in MailChimp and you can then select the desired list and the prospects are transferred. At this point you are ready to send out an email marketing campaign — it couldn’t be easier. P1Wired will be further enhanced with the “bounce” and “opt out” information sent back to P1Wired so that you can measure your email marketing effectiveness over time.
If you are a photographer that is new to the business, check out the FREE email marketing level in MailChimp. It is a great way to get started with email marketing!
MailChimp