Its been an incredibly busy few days for me since our last Monday Morning Ramble as I’ve been trying to sort out our pre-Christmas bookings. In fact from the time I woke up last Monday (7am) till it got dark I was making a baby portrait booking almost every hour.

After 6 months of using direct mail as our main marketing strategy I must say I am convinced despite what we’re paying out on leads, letters and postage each month.

In the last seven months we’ve photographed somewhere in the region of 140 babies. That’s an average of about 5 a week which is pretty manageable.
I do expect that figure to at the very least double if not possibly treble but Spring 2012 which in some ways is quite a daunting prospect.

If this week has proved anything it’s that having a good database and calendar system is invaluable.

A shudder to think how my post-it/excel spreadsheet system would have handled it!

It’s not just having an organised database it’s having a system for everything we do.
I’ve developed email and text templates which enable to to respond quickly to enquiries before I forget about them. I’ve also fine tuned the way we collect the relevant information from a client which includes whether they’ll be happy if I print 5000 flyers with their baby’s face on.

The way we shoot has also come along nicely and while we’re not shooting each baby the exact same way there are shots we know sell well and are worth getting.

In retrospect 2011 has been a good year but I’m even more excited about what has to come in 2012.
Still, the year ain’t over yet but hopefully I can keep my new year’s resolution at not be doing deliveries on Christmas eve!

Questions

If you do have any questions then here’s where you can find me…
On Twitter @memorygate
Google+ profile
PhotoCreative365 Facebook page 
Tumblr account (mostly Instagram images)
Good old fashioned email

Tweets of the week

I’ll be picking out a few interesting tweets and links that pass through my stream……….most likely be saving them to my favourites.