Education

10 Ways We Use Honeybook to Elevate our Client Experience

April 22, 2019

Education – Honeybook

If you’re a photographer and you’re just starting to get all of those dreamy clients you’ve been looking for your whole life (or heck, if you’ve been in business for years now), we totally get how over whelming client management can get. Between sending contracts, keeping account of payments, bookkeeping, keeping emails straight, files sent back and forth, galleries getting lost in the sea of emails, it can be A LOT. There are so many things on your to do list! Creating a strong client experience that elevates each portrait or wedding experience doesn’t have to be this thing that you start from scratch every time you get a new inquiry.

It also doesn’t mean that you need to hire a virtual assistant or even an in person assistant to take over these tasks for you. We have worked so hard over the years to refine some strategic automated tools on the backend of our business that allows us to serve our clients WELL while still making sure that tasks that can be done by someone (or someTHING) other than us, are getting done.

(Have you been on the fence about HoneyBook? How about a 50% off code? CLICK HERE. No need to read the rest of the blog post, just do it. Thank yourself later.)

10 Easy Ways We use Honeybook to Elevate Our Client Experience

The BIGGEST and BEST tool that we have learned to use to create a seamless client experience is Honeybook. We’ve been using HoneyBook for years at this point and we can not ever imagine going back to any other client management system. We used to use 17hats, we’ve played around with Dubsado, but nothing ever compared to HoneyBook. Each year, HoneyBook team comes up with bigger and better features to help our business run smoother than the year prior.

Today, we’re sharing 10 ways that HoneyBook has elevated our client experience while also creating more free time for US to enjoy life with each other, our family, and friends.

1. HoneyBook Creates An Integrated Home Portal for Clients

Honeybook Client Portal Example by Costola Photography

The first thing that HoneyBook does is create a home base for all of our client’s projects. Instead of spending time in Google Docs, Emails, etc. trying to keep all of the files in a row, HoneyBook does it all for us. Using HoneBook to streamline invoices, proposals, guides, and all the things we’re sending to our clients on a weekly basis has made our lives so much easier. It hasnt just made our lives easier, but also our clients lives easier! I can only imagine how hard it is to plan a wedding on top of alllll of the other vendors that our clients are working with, and trying to keep all of these conversations straight.

Now, instead of searching through their inbox trying to find our last conversation, they can just log into their account and they can see all of their files, contracts, emails, in one place.

2. Honeybook Syncs With Your Email (And Has An App!)

YES! All of those emails that you send back and forth with a client on GMail? It syncs to their client portal. We can be emailing through gmail, and it will all show up in their client portal. If you email your clients a timeline or questionnaire that needs to be answered, they can just easily click on the link that lands in their inbox and answer the questionnaire, no matter where they are.

Not only that, but it can all be accessed through their app! This means we can send invoices, answer emails, send contracts, etc. on the go! It is such a great way for you and your clients to be proactive with your use of time, because who has the time to sit in front of their desktop all day?

3. HoneyBook Is On Brand With Any Business

The final straw for why we switched from 17hats to HoneyBook was because of the branding issues we were having with 17hats. HoneyBook allows you to completely customize everything about what your client sees so that it matches your branding 100%. This was very important to us because we wanted our clients to have a cohesive Costola experience without weird bright green buttons and fonts that were just not clean enough, in our opinion. We never felt like we truly had control over how everything looked.

We can customize header images, upload our logo, choose our brand color, all in our settings so that they are the same on every that we send out. This means that our resources are presented in a polished way that reflects our brand accordingly. It may not seem like that big of a deal, but when a client decides that they are going to invest heavily into you and your business, you want to reflect the refined and professional vibe from start to finish.

4. Honeybook Has So Many Features That Better Serve Your Clients

HoneyBooks features… where do we even start? Yes, they have invoicing, client contracts, email integration, etc. But let’s talk about the things that you always needed but never had, until now.

Did you know that HoneyBook has a timeline feature? This is great for not only photographers, but wedding planners, florists, EVERYONE. You can create a timeline right in their client portal that they can go back to at any time to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

One feature that we love to use? Brochures! We use this feature in a little bit of different way than you would think – and we will go over this in the sixth way we use HoneyBook.

5. Sign Contracts & Get Paid With The Click Of A Button

Honeybook Proposal Example by Costola Photography

Tired of printing and scanning and emailing and printing and scanning and emailing all of those paper contracts? What if you could send a proposal to a client with the contract, payment schedule, ways for them to pay their payments THROUGH THE INVOICE, sign a contract with a click of a button, have your money transferred straight into your bank account? Sounds like a dream, right? Well, here’s your dream come true. With HoneyBook, you can do all of this, no more scanning, no more printing, no more losing contracts and waiting for checks in the mail. Just send, click, pay, and done.

6. The Brochure Feature – More Than Just Sending Pricing

Honeybook Brochure Example by Costola Photography

Most people use the brochure feature in HoneyBook to send their pricing to their clients, which is an obvious and GREAT way to utilize the system to your advantage. But did you also know that you can great a GUIDE with the brochure? We use brochures to create a guide for our clients to be able to access and find links to all of the important things that we do for our couples. Links to the #CostolaCouples Facebook Group, links to the bridal guide on our website, information about our albums and wall portraits, it’s all found right there, in their Online Wedding Guide, in their client portal.

7. Easy Bookkeeping That Is Integrated With Quickbooks

Spreadsheets, be gone! HoneyBook keeps track of all of your payments and you can find them in their Bookkeeping tool. You can also sync it with Quickbooks to keep all of your expenses in one place as well. This allows you to see your profit and loss margins at any time, right in HoneyBook! It also shows your upcoming payments, any late payments (which you will never have because HoneyBook also sends automated reminder emails to your clients when a payment is coming up), AND you can export it all to a file to give to your accountant!

8. Workflows Make The World Go ‘Round

Workflows. Probably our favorite thing about HoneyBook. Do you send the same emails, questionnaires, invoices, payment reminders, etc. to your clients? HoneyBook has a workflow feature that allows your ENTIRE workflow to be completely automated. No more trying to keep track of when you should be sending that timeline questionnaire. No more letting payments fall through the cracks. Emails go out automatically, HoneyBook notifies you when your client has submitted a questionnaire, it’s all being done for you, so you can focus on GROWING your business, instead of making sure that it’s not falling apart on a daily basis.

9. Perfect For A Team!

Since bringing in Marie as our associate photographer, HoneyBook made it SO EASY to add her to client portals. You literally just click on her little picture to add her to the project, and BOOM, she gets every email, file, questionnaire right to her HoneyBook portal. HOW EASY?!

10. Their Customer Service is Unlike Any Other

The last thing that we’re obsessed with – HoneyBook’s support team. Do you have a suggestion that you’d like HoneyBook to make a change on? Just let them know! A REAL person will contact you, letting you know that your voice has been heard and that they may already be in the works of making that change come true!

They respond almost immediately, even though HoneyBook is actually a smaller business. It isn’t some large corporation like Google. It is REAL people helping REAL people.

They are always looking for ways to improve the system and make our jobs easier. And THAT is a company that we want to get behind and support.

Want to Try HoneyBook?

Are you done with all of my rambling? Want to just try it out yourself? HoneyBook offers a FREE 7 day trial so you can see how it all works, see why we fell in love with it, and allow YOU to see the backend of our favorite client management system before you commit. Even better news – if you decide you want to join HoneyBook, we have 50% off code for you to use! That’s $200 in savings!!!

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about costola

meet andie

At home near the sea. Ever-focused on beauty and the thrilling art of creation; found in the moments that leave me breathless and in awe. 

After 15 years of capturing couples and families during the most precious times of their lives, she can truly say that this is exactly where she is meant to be. When she isn't photographing weddings, Andie enjoys the outdoors alongside her husband, Tony and daughters, Ava & Audrey.

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