Master The Art Of Business

Before proceeding, be sure you have read the first four blogs in this series, Emailing pdf invoices which will walk you through setting up PhotoOne to send emails and setting up an email account (if necessary) to receive replies, Part 1: Automatically remind customers of appointments! which will walk you through creating custom emails, testing the emails, the difference between active and inactive email templates, Part 2: Market via email with images! which will allow you to add images to your email templates, and Part 3:  What triggers an automatic email for appointments?

The first thing you need to do is go to Utilities / Maintenance Area / Manage Data Logs / Purge Logs.  You’ll want to be sure to eliminate everything in the log file  so use a very broad date range; we suggest 01-01-2000 through today.  Click “Start” and then click “No” when asked if you want to query.  Think of the Log file as your PhotoOne Outbox and purging will clear out any old unsent emails. Now we need to setup the mechanism that sends the emails.

Then, you will want to go to Setup / Business Settings / Orders.  If you look about ¾ of the way down this screen, you’ll see a box that is looking for a number, ‘How many days prior to today should the PhotoOne monitor look when scanning for orders that require automated email notifications, such as “your order is ready” the recommended setting is 2 (we will be covering this in another blog about automated order reminders.)

Next you’ll need to go to Utilities / Maintenance Area / PhotoOne Monitor and in the upper left corner put a check mark in Email and a check mark in Appointment Email Reminders.  Now, click on the button Setup and in the lower left corner of the new window make sure there is a 1 in the box labeled “Run the monitors this often”.  (Setting it to 1 will allow you to quickly test that emails are being sent, you can go back later and increase it up to 120.)  You’ll need to close the monitor to save the changes you just made.

Now, minimize PhotoOne and on the desktop Right click on your PhotoOne Icon and go to Properties.  Click on the “Find target” button or “Open file location” which will open the PhotoOne folder.  Locate a file called p1mon.exe, right click on it and select Send to / Desktop create shortcut.  Close the Windows Explorer window and the PhotoOne properties.

On the desktop locate the Shortcut to p1mon, right click on it and select Cut.  Go to start and then Programs or all programs, right click on Startup / Open, and in the folder right click and paste.  This will now launch p1mon every time the computer is restarted as the monitor must be running at all times for emails to be sent.  When you reboot, you need to be SURE to minimize the monitor (don’t close it).

Back in PhotoOne, go to Utilities / Maintenance Area / PhotoOne Monitor and then simply minimize it.  Now you’ll want to book an appointment for yourself using an appointment type you have setup with a Thanks for booking, or if you have 1, 2, 7 day reminders, book an appointment in the future for the number of days it would take to kick off the reminder.  In one minute you can go check your email address and confirm you received the email.

Tagged as: marketing, Sending emails

Before proceeding, be sure you have read the first three blogs in this series, Emailing pdf invoices which will walk you through setting up PhotoOne to send emails and setting up an email account (if necessary) to receive replies, and Part 1: Automatically remind customers of appointments! which will walk you through creating custom text emails, testing the emails, the difference between active and inactive email templates, and Part 2: Market via email with images! which will allow you to add images to your email templates.

I’m sure you noticed in Part 2: Adding Images to emails that when you create a new email, it asked you what type of email you’re creating and perhaps you didn’t quite know what to select.

You may have noticed that most of the types are in black text, any email type in black means you can only have ONE email with that type.

For example, you can only create ONE -1, 2, 7, 14 or 30 day appointment reminder.  If you plan on using the email you are creating for more than one appointment type, don’t be too specific.  You would not want to mention senior photography in the email if you will also be using it for family portrait sessions.

Here are the most commonly used types and when they are sent out:

Appointment, thank you for booking- An appointment is added to the calendar, period.  Since this text is in black, that means you can only have ONE of these, but more likely you won’t want to activate a template with this type since you would typically want to send out specialized instructions (what to wear, hair tips, etc.) you can create a special email template using the only email type that is in red:  Use this for bulk email marketing, special notification, and other emails that don’t fall in the other categories on this screen.

You would select the red email type, then in the Document Name and Subject line you call this template “Thanks for booking your Senior Appointment” or “Thanks for booking your Family Appointment”.  The point being, you want to be able to determine WHICH appointment type this template is going to be used on. Now you can type the body of the email and be as specific as you want for that type of appointment.

Appointment reminders (1 day, 2 days, 7 days, 14 days, and 30 days)- Sends an email reminder x days before the appointment. Since you can only have one of these types of emails, you want to be generic in what you have in the body of the email.

After you have tested each email you created or updated and they look good in your in-box (the in-box email address setup in Part 1 of this series), you will now want to go back to the Email Editor and activate the email.  You will simply highlight the email and click the activate button at the bottom of the window.  Now we need to tell PhotoOne which appointment types will be getting reminders and thanks for booking.

Go to Setup / Appointment Types, and edit an appointment type that you’d like to receive either a Thanks for Booking or Reminders emails and go to the Email Reminders / Thank you tab.  Put check marks in any of the reminder boxes, and if you created a custom Thanks for booking for this appointment type, click the down arrow and select the template you created using the red email template type.  (Note: 3 day reminder, found under Email Reminders/ Thank You tab, is a typo and should read 7 day)

Our next blog will cover the steps you need to do to get the emails out of the studio and to your clients.

Tagged as: marketing, Sending emails

Did you know you can add images to your emails in PhotoOne, whether they are going to be automatically sent or marketing emails?  If you have a fall special, add an image of the leaves changing colors; an Easter special with ducks and bunnies, add images to drive home your message; for wedding clients if you send an automatic Thanks for booking, include an image of a wedding dress and tux.

Before proceeding, be sure you have read the first two blogs in this series, Emailing pdf invoices which will walk you through setting up PhotoOne to send emails and setting up an email account (if necessary) to receive replies, and Part 1: Automatically remind customers of appointments! which will walk you through creating custom text emails, testing the emails, and the difference between active and inactive email templates.

To include an image in an email, the client must be able to access the image; if it’s on your c:\ drive, they won’t see it.  The solution: put it on the web.  It can, but doesn’t have to, be accessible on your website; you or your webmaster can create a folder behind the scenes called P1Images (or whatever rock’s your boat).  You can also use free image posting sites like Photobucket, Facebook, Imgur, or TinyPic.  Ideally an image in an email should be a jpg or gif, the size should be 72dpi and width no bigger than 640 pixels.

Once you have the image uploaded you’ll need to copy the address (usually appearing something like this www.website.com/images/name.jpg) of where the image is located; this is often called a direct link. You can get the direct link either by actually viewing the image, so you can get the address located in the address bar of your browser, or you may have to right click on the image and select Copy image location, some sites will provide a link for you to copy.

After copying the image address go to the PhotoOne email editor and edit the email template you’re working on. Place your cursor in the body where you want the image to show, and click on the picture of a mountain in the upper right corner, to the left of the Merge Tokens button. Then paste the image address in the Picture Source box and click Ok.  You’ll now see the image in your email.

Anytime you create a new email template be SURE to test it, you want to be positive that what your customer gets is a beautiful email.

Our next blog will cover automatic email trigger events.

Tagged as: marketing, Sending emails

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