Retouchup Blog

You have a fixed number of hours in a week, but numberless possibilities for what to do with them.

If you had to prioritize the following activities according to what will make the biggest difference to your business’ growth, where would retouching fall?

• Staying in better contact with past clients.
• Finding new ways to market to the community.
• Asking for referrals from existing clients.
• Building a social network following (twitter/facebook/blog).
• Researching which up-sell products are most popular.
• Streamlining your studio workflow.
• Spending more time with each client.
• Creating (new) seasonal promotions.
• Creating alliances with related businesses.

Does retouching blemishes and stray hairs make the list?

By rearranging what we do with our limited time, we can make a big impact on our job satisfaction and business growth.

If you found RetouchUp.com in response to a retouching emergency, consider exploring using us as a business tool to allow you to reallocate limited hours.

Some activities we do can pay long-term dividends.  Others are necessary, but once they’re done, the benefit is over.

One activity has continued to pay dividends for a long time, and that’s the auto-responder email series we created to welcome new clients.

This series of 4-6 brief emails (writen about a year ago in an afternoon, but revised regularly) is sent out to new clients over time.  All we have to do is give iContact that week’s new signups – and they will get a brief, helpful email introducing them to features they’ll need to know about. 

Not only is this helpful for new users – it’s a useful way to get people information over time, not through a firehose all at once – it’s a great way to keep us in their mind. 

An auto-responder series can be useful anytime you have a series of information you’d like to keep in front of willing recipients. 

How about a “Top Ten Wedding Tips From a Wedding Pro: Advice from someone who has attended hundreds of weddings from Alpine to Payson.”  Perhaps each wedding tip is sent out three days apart.  A wedding photographer’s site might be visited by many brides-to-be comparing galleries – what an advantage it would be to capture these potential clients’ email address with the promise of some juicy tips on having the best wedding possible…  Then to stay present in this person’s mind as the 10 tips unfold.

We email our new clients, but you could have a web form collect them on your site.  iContact is the company we use.  They can do auto-responders, email newsletters, as well as email tracking.

For us, our auto-responder series has really been time we felt was well spent and continues to pay dividends.