5 Steps to Manage Wedding Clients with Gmail and Google Docs

By Lara White

This week we welcome guest blogger Matteo Cuzzola from Milan. Matteo travels all over Italy and Europe to photograph weddings, and developed a simple and efficient system for staying organized while on the road. He shares his system with PhotoMint, and I think you'll enjoy the simplicity and ease of this wedding client organizational system. Here's a bit more about Matteo:

If you like stories in pictures, travelling and food, we’re going to be good friends. I just know it. I am an enthusiastic photographer since childhood and I have the privilege of documenting the most important moments in people’s lives. My style is to capture the great moments and those are usually the images that the subjects didn’t even know I was shooting. To see Matteo's work, visit his website: Matteo Cuzzola.

For weddings, I travel often and my office is always with me, in the Cloud. Let me show you how I do it.

Let's take a look at how you can organize requests for quotes, email clients efficiently and accurately with Gmail in 5 steps. The most important Gmail feature we will be using is Labels, check out some tips here and here. Since 2005, Google has provided a simple and powerful interface for email and documents management. Five year ago, I decided to switch to Gmail Google Apps service with a clear aim to have all my office documents and CRM online.

First, I create three “father” labels for every year:

P12 for prospects for 2012

W12-TODO for clients (weddings) in 2012

-W12-DONE for finished projects, 2012

The concept is to have one label per client and move it through these three father labels, from the first contact to the delivery of the package. Let’ s see the five steps:

Step 1:

When a prospect writes me for a quote I assign a label to the email called:

P12/mm-dd_surname (So it will be nested to P12)

Note: mm is for month and dd for day. Note that using this format month-day will automatically sort the labels by ascending date.

For every request for a quote I create a label and I put it nested to the label P12/ in this way:

So I have the list of the requests for quotes per year, collapsible with a click.

Step 2:

When I set an appointment with a client I create the event on Google Calendar and I save in the notes a link to the label of Gmail, so I can have access to all the history of the client/prospect with just a click from the Calendar.

Tip: search on Gmail “label:name_of_the_label” and you will get the link for the label in the address bar 🙂

Step 3:

When a prospect becomes a customer (yesss!) I change the prospect label in this way:

from: P12/mm-dd-surname to: W12-TODO/mm-dd-surname

So it will automatically be nested under the label of weddings for the year 2012, which is called W12-TODO in this way:

At this point, I have a group of labels for the prospects and a group for customers. Note that the labels are automatically ordered by date and this is very useful when I check at a glance which days for 2012 are already booked. I generally scan the contracts of the wedding services and send it to myself via email and assign it the right label. This way, I have all the information of the wedding in Gmail under one label.

Tip: the color green is for the customers that have paid the booking fee. If not yet paid, it would be red 🙂

Step 4:

After the wedding day I change the father label this way: from: W12-TODO/xx-xx-xxxxx to: -W12-DONE/xx-xx-xxxxx

Step 5:

Once the package is delivered, I change the color from green to grey. Finished!

Note: I use -W12-DONE with the – (dash) because I want it on top of the list of labels, so it is separated from W12-TODO .

I know it sounds complicated but it allows me to create groups to be organized with a simple interface that can be accessed from anywhere with any device connected to the Internet. For this reason, I don’t use gmail-labs or browser add-ons that would not be replicated on mobile devices.

Data management on Google Docs

To save all the details for the wedding day, I decided to use one spreadsheet per year (called “Weddings 2012”) with one single sheet per client. All the sheets are ordered by date of event and contain all the information I need that day:

A few days before the wedding I check all these information with the bride and the groom (note: a few days before, not weeks, as schedules can change!) On the day of the wedding I print this sheet in two copies, one for me and one for my assistant.

There is another important sheet in this file. It is called The Summary Grid similar to the image below:

This is a simple snapshot of the work in progress of all my scheduled weddings. The rows are all the steps of my workflow (but this is another story :-) The columns are the dates of the events. I maintain this grid updated every day (OK not quite:-P) to always have the status of my work in progress available. This is an easy way to ensure I complete all the steps! You can't imagine how beautiful it is to see all OK (green) cells at the end of the year!

This is my way of working, and I wanted to share this system in case it helps others. If you have any suggestions or just to tell me I'm crazy, write to me and I'll take that as a compliment! 🙂

Want more organizational goodness? Here you go:

How to Name Image Files

8 Tips for Taming the Production Beast

Get More Bookings by Staying Organized

Tagged as: cloud based system wedding photographers, gmail system for wedding photographers, using google docs track weddings, wedding organization