Photography clients email subscription strategy

Hi! I'm new here and thanks in advance for your help.

 

I have clients emails scattered all over the place:

- I have emails collected using a mailchimp form on my website. This form syncs with mailchimp for newsletters and Tave for scheduling/invoicing.

- Then i have emails of those who registered to galleries on Pixieset which i manually export from Pixieset and add to mailchimp

- I also have emails of those who contacted us directly without using the website form, which i want to add to mailchimp.

- Then i also have emails collected using the Square POS during events.

 

What is the best way to consolidate all of this and make everything more streamlined and efficient? What's your experience with this?

 

Also, in Mailchimp, do you group your subscribers based on status so you can send different campaigns based on where the customer is in the sales funnel? Say Cold Leads, Warm leads, clients, repeat clients etc. Do you have a better way to automatically move subscribers from one group to another based on sales/status history?

 

I know these are a lot of questions but maybe we can all benefit from one another.

 

Thank you!

Zach

Hi Phil,

 

Yes i use Tave. Dunno if you've heard of it but essentially it's one of the best studio CRMs out there, with one caveat: It doesn't have email marketing. I like to use dedicated software simply because they tend to do just one thing very well like MailChimp. What's your setup like?

I can consider switching CRMs but i'm way to involved in Tave cos i have everything setup already: prices, emails, templates, automations etc. It would take me very long to switch, especially that i want everything setup before a wedding show on Jan 6th.

I will use Zappier to sync between Square and Mailchimp, and the website form already syncs with MC. I need to find a way to sync clients that email us directly (maybe i need to do this manually), and another way to sync Pixieset (the online photo gallery i use to send galleries and mobile apps to clients) with MC.

Are you looking for a way to organize client information? Or does it need to be seamlessly joined with an email/subscription system? You mentioned mailchimp a few times, are you looking for something that integrates with it?

I haven't used either package you mention, but a possible simple solution: can you set the Reply-To email in the Mailchimp marketing mails? This would at least cause replies to be sent to any mail address you set, which could then be the one used in your CRM package.

 

As for all other touchpoints, does't the CRM have APIs you can use to generate a case in this system, and use that rather than making each touchpoint send a mail to its own dedicated mailbox, or failing that, make them send email to your CRM platform instead. Basically, you should either end up using one mailbox, or use programmatic creation of cases in your CRM, not see how to sync mailboxes as that will continue to be a headache (as you'd still have a bunch of mailboxes to monitor to ensure the sync actually works).