9 Time-Saving Tools You Need

When you start your day, what are some of the first things you tackle on your seemingly endless list of things to do? From checking emails to responding to clients and vendors, to planning your next wedding shoot, it can feel as if there is always too much happening at once. On the one hand, it is a positive sign you are so busy; it means you have clients who want to work with you and who help you grow your business! On the other hand, juggling too many tasks can become stressful and overwhelming.

If your focus is not on developing plans to continue growing your business, you may fall behind and miss your goals for the year. Therefore, it is necessary for you to find ways to create systems and plans to help speed up your workflow. These systems will then allow you to spend more time on the parts of your business that generate profit. Here are 9 Time-Saving Tools that are critical for your business and for staying on track.

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1. Canned Responses for Emails

Working with clients and vendors means much of your communication happens through email. Instead of writing individual emails that have the same copy, utilize Gmail’s canned response feature. Creating canned responses for emails is essential in saving time during your daily routine. Try this tool for multiple emails you send daily, such as informing clients about the status of their images. Once you create and save your canned responses, all you have to do is select the template and the correct copy appears in the email draft. Using this tool can save hours of writing and sending emails, which allows you to accomplish more of your tasks during the day.

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Related: Are you using these 12 Apple shortcuts to speed up your day?

2. Boomerang

Scheduling a certain time each day to send emails to clients or vendors can be difficult for you as a busy wedding photographer. With shoots happening from morning to evening, it is quite possible the only time you have to send emails is late at night while you are uploading your images. Although this is maybe the best time for you to work on your emails, it is not the best time for you to send them to your clients or vendors.

Boomerang for Gmail is a tool that allows you to schedule the release of your emails, so you do not need to manually send them. This helps with your busy schedule because you can schedule your emails all at once and let Boomerang send them at the time of your choosing.

3. IFTTT

Sharing photos after the wedding day is over is important to your clients who are anxiously looking for them on your blog, website, and social media platforms. However, individually scheduling to each network can take you more time than you usually have during the day. IFTTT creates recipes for you to connect your products and apps, which means you can post images to all of your social media platforms at once. If you share an image on Instagram, you can create a recipe that automatically posts the same image to Twitter. The time you would spend scheduling on each platform individually is cut down, so you can move on to other important projects.

4. Dropbox

Booking multiple clients also creates multiple documents and paperwork. It is important for you to stay organized and communicate with your clients at all times. Using email to share images and documents can become a messy process, as you may be communicating with more than one client at a time. Dropbox allows you to create specific folders for your clients, where they can drop in files and documents when needed. It is a simple process that helps you keep your clients’ information and documents in one place without having to organize them yourself.

5. BlogStomp

Uploading to your blog and sharing your images is the next step once you receive them back from a post-production photography service. Since curating your images is essential to grabbing the attention of your ideal client, how can you simplify the process? BlogStomp is a workflow tool that can help speed up the process of uploading and sharing your images. Not only does BlogStomp help you quickly organize your images, but you can also instantly them on your blog and social media networks.

Related: Are you overwhelmed in your workflow? Here are 20 tasks you can take off your list today!

6. Hootsuite

Staying top of mind with your clients (past, present, and potential) is important in the competitive wedding photography industry and the ever-changing technological world. The best way to do this is to share your brand message on social media. There are many options for you to use to showcase your portfolio, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Since posting to each network can be time-consuming, Hootsuite lets you schedule your posts in advance to multiple social media platforms. You can schedule to more than one network at a time, and keep track of the analytics once the posts are live.

7. Google Docs

Keeping your data organized can be difficult when you are constantly on the go and have multiple clients at the same time. From multiple forms of paperwork to the wedding day schedule, and your clients’ post-wedding orders, there are many important details you need to hold onto. Using Google Docs can help you stay organized at all times. Since you can edit the documents whenever necessary, this means you do not need to create new spreadsheets for every detail of your clients’ wedding packages.

8. MailChimp

Communicating with your clients, creating connections, and staying in touch, all through email is important. Since this is a professional way for your clients to reach you, it is likely you can send hundreds of emails every single month. For the most part, clients meet you through email for the first time. Just as it is important to make a good first impression on your website and blog, it is crucial that your emails have the same effect on clients. MailChimp allows you to customize and design email templates so they match your brand. You can also share your emails or newsletter on various social media platforms with MailChimp, which gives you more opportunities to capture the attention of potential clients.

9. Asana

Delegating tasks you do not personally need to take care of is necessary for any business. As a wedding photography business owner, it is no different. It is important to make sure you can communicate with your team to get tasks completed. For the most part, you use email to reach out to your clients and vendors. It can be helpful to use a different space for working with associates and communicating about projects. Asana is a project management tool you can use to effectively communicate with your associates. You can assign projects to the appropriate user, create due dates, and discuss assignments all in one space. This helps organize your workload and ensures that your projects will be completed on time.

Using these 9 tools for your wedding photography business can help you save time during your day-to-day tasks. Discover additional ways to speed up your workflow with our Guide, 27 Simple Hacks to Transform your Wedding Photography Business!