A Good Client Experience Isn’t What You Think it Is
January 4, 2024
Hey photographers! Welcome back to our Photography Blog, Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah! Our students ask us all the time to teach them about what makes for a good “client experience”. But then we start asking them questions about the experience that they give to their portrait and wedding photography clients. Pretty soon, we realize that most of them are confused about what makes up a good client experience!
So today, we’re discussing what does and doesn’t make up a robust and attractive client experience. And we’re going to discuss how you can take your client experience and your workflow to the next level! This is not only going to save you time, but also make life easier for you customers, give them a better experience with you… and you can make more money in the process.
What Our Students Think a Good Client Experience Looks Like
Here’s the truth about your client experience. It isn’t about giving your clients a gift at the end of their engagement session, and it isn’t about taking a polaroid picture of them on their wedding day. Or at least, it isn’t just about those things. Your clients’ experience is the sum of all the interactions you have with them over the course of their entire journey with you, and how you made them feel throughout that process. From the moment that an interested couple or parent or family lead pops up in your inbox, the client experience has begun. And everything that happens between that moment and your final goodbye is part of a good client experience.
This diagram below is a visual representation of what most of our students think that a good client experience is. They expect it to be a 50-50 split between interacting with their clients in-person, and interacting with them online or over the phone or video chat. And the commonality between these two is how we make our customers feel.
This is what many of our students think their client experience will look like: an equal part of online and in-person communication, with both parts equally affecting how they make their clients feel.
What Good Client Experience REALLY Is
But after almost a decade as professional photographers, we know that it’s more like this diagram below. Our average wedding client journey lasts about 10-12 months, but some have been as long as two years. And during that time, we’ll interact with our wedding couples in-person just twice: their engagement session and on their wedding day. And of course how we make them feel on their wedding day is incredibly important. But it makes up a relatively small part of their client experience. Plus, by the time we’re with them in person on their wedding day, we’re already 80% of the way through their journey with us.
In reality, this is what our client experiences really look like! We interact with our couples far more online than we do in-person. This is good new for your workflow!
The Secret Sauce: A Good Workflow
That’s why the secret to an incredible client experience is actually more about your workflow: the repeatable steps that you take each client through digitally… from the first inquiry response, all the way through requesting 5-star reviews and saying farewell.
And the beauty of this part of your customer experience — your workflow — is that it can be refined and optimized. It can be set up in such a way that makes it both a pleasure for your clients to experience, AND incredibly efficient, saving you time and energy. This allows you to spend less time on emails and answering questions, and more time doing things that only you can do, like shooting weddings or booking new jobs!
Our Full Wedding Photography Workflow
That’s why Sarah and I are going to focus on good client experience and our online workflow in our next For-Photographers workshop! We’re going to host it live on Tuesday, January 30th, 2024 from 7 – 9 PM ET. It’s called: Our Wedding Photography Workflow: How to Build a Pleasant and Efficient Client Experience, from Inquiry to 5-Star Review. You can learn more here!
In our first workshop of 2024, we’re going to walk our students step-by-step through every single piece of our workflow — both for portrait sessions AND for wedding jobs. But we know that not every single photography business looks exactly the same as ours. So as we walk through each step, we’re going to teach you why we do what we do. That way, you can figure out if you want to just copy our workflow exactly, or use it as more of a starting point to build your own!
And we’re not just going to cover the what and the why. We’re also going to talk about how we execute each step in our workflow. If you’re still in the early days of your business and mostly using free tools like Gmail and PDF contracts, we’ll show you the best free tools that we used in the early days of our business. But for those of you who are a little further along in your business, we’re also going to cover how you can integrate your workflow into a paid software like Honeybook, which will allow you to automate entire chunks of your client workflow, without sacrificing the personal touch that allows us to book high-end, boutique wedding jobs in the $10,000+ range.
Click here to learn more!
Templates, Questionnaires, and Spreadsheets. Oh My!
Alongside this workshop, we’re going to put some items up for sale that we’ve NEVER listed before. Like our full suite of 70+ email templates, as well as the questionnaire we send ahead of weddings to make sure we have everything we need to know.
We’re also going to sell copies of our Client Workflow Tracker, to make sure that you never miss a deadline for delivering your clients’ images again. And if you buy all these resources along with the workshop, they’ll not only make your workflow more professional and efficient, but you’ll also get them discounted when you buy them all together!
The Details
We know that this workshop is going to help a LOT of photographers out there get organized, get out of their inboxes, and give their clients a much better experience along the way. And as always, if you can’t make it to the live workshop on January 30th, 2024 you can still buy your ticket today to get instant access to a replay of the workshop as soon as it’s available!
And of course, if you’re reading this blog January 2024, the entire workshop replay is available to stream instantly, using this same link! Check it out today!
Remember, making your life easier by creating a killer workflow can ALSO improve the experience that you give your clients. So click here to learn more about our workshop, and get ready to take your workflow to the next level in our Client Experience Workshop!
