Thriving photo business owner Amy Helt talks about the power of communicating with your clients and automating your to-do list.

Every successful photographer knows that building a business means wearing a lot of hats. There’s pricing, payments, booking, marketing, delivering finished work. . .the daily to-do list goes on and on, and that’s before you even get to the creative work that is your photo business’ beating heart. We talked with a thriving Wisconsin wedding and family photographer, Amy Helt, about what it really takes to make a photo business flourish, and how she uses the Zenfolio ProSuite all-in-one photo business workflow solution to manage her day-to-day.

So, what is Helt’s secret to success? “Making a connection with your clients,” she tells us. “Letting them get to know the real you and being consistent and professional are huge. You can put all the pretty pictures out there, but if people don’t feel like they know you, they won’t trust you and they won’t book you.”

Cultivating her relationships with clients is work that Helt loves and can’t delegate to anyone else. So, to maximize her time for it, she happily hands routine photo business tasks off to Zenfolio. The ProSuite intelligent workflow automation tools help her set the right prices for her market, get finished work out to clients, and quickly customize an automated email campaign whenever she wants to run a promotion. Having everything set up to run automatically not only saves her time but ensures that clients’ needs are met even on her busiest days.

The photo business platform makes it easy for Helt to update her portfolio website, since ProSuite offers a raft of features and services that she can add just by dragging and dropping. “I love that you’re able to fully customize everything,” she says. “They have really beautiful options, and now they even have video. In galleries, clients are able to choose their favorites and download them. I can see what they do behind the scenes, and they can make comments, on images. If there’s anything else they want me to edit, they can comment and I can fix it up and pop it right back in.”

Helt added the Zenfolio BookMe feature to her site just before the holiday season. “I literally booked seven of eight mini-session slots right away,” she says. “With BookMe, right at the top of my website page clients could see what dates were available and all the details, and book and pay right there. Before, I had to send them a quote and wait for them to accept the quote and wait for them to pay. But with BookMe, it was like, boom—they already paid. I can even set how many downloads they have and what prints they get as part of the package. It actually creates a gallery for them from the very get-go, so once they book, the gallery is there with their email already entered. All I have to do is drop the photos from the shoot into their pre-configured gallery and everything else just happens. That’s awesome.”

With ProSuite multitasking for her in the background, Helt is able to keep her client relationships and creative work front and center. “I really make a connection with people,” she says. “I treat them like family. I want to be people’s family portrait photographer for all stages of their life.” 

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