Mini-Sessions

0:00 in this video we're going to cover mini sessions in Check Cherry so many sessions are popular with portrait photographers it's a group of short time slots and this feature makes the scheduling process easy for both you and your clients many sessions just have one date one location however they do have back to back short time slots

0:25 and it's a limited offering so you're going to have to create a new mini session and specify the date and location manually then you'll have your customers pick a time slot and book so let's take a look at how the client will experience booking a mini session with you okay so i'm at a mini session booking page for the pumpkin patch mini sessions and you'll notice it

0:52 has a date here and also how much per session and you'll basically send somebody a link and they can get to this page and review the details so it also have a location where the mini session is happening and any details you can include a description images related to the mini sessions and below here you'll see i have available time slots and in fact this shows all time slots and

1:22 we cross out the ones which have been already booked and they can pick a slot that is available by simply clicking it so let's say i take the 130 slot i'm going to come to a page to confirm my slot and secure it with a payment and you'll notice this countdown timer here we hold the slot for five minutes and that helps put some pressure on the person to finalize the booking and it also

1:52 helps avoid uh things like double bookings or bad customer experiences if they go grab their credit card and come back and make an order and somebody else has taken it for example um and so here are the order details and i go down and i can pick the deposit or the full amount i type in my name my email phone enter my card and i scroll down i'll see the terms and conditions and then i will sign

2:25 and say yep i have read and agree to the terms and conditions and click reserve slot so once that's done it'll be on your calendar and unavailable for somebody else to book okay so let's take a look at how we create a new mini session i'm logged into my Check Cherry account and in the top right you'll see create new so if i click that i'm going to create a new mini

2:52 session and this is going to take me to a page where i have several options the name of the mini session so maybe i want fall minis a description and so this is going to give the client an idea of what they're going to get from the mini session you can also add images here there's a status so most of the time it's going to be public there also is a private and disabled status and then

3:20 down here we set the date the price and so on so let's let's set the date for oh november 14th we'll start it at uh 10 a.m and end it at 4 30 p.m sounds good each slot let's say 30 minutes no time between slots you can certainly put a buffer in here and it's going to be 150 and i want a 50 deposit and so here we can choose to add sales tax or not

3:59 and then the location of the shoot so i'm just going to leave this as his and once i click save check cherry is automatically going to figure out how many slots there are and so on so let's do that okay so my mini session's been created and if i go to the overview page you'll see i've got some details the address the name the slots are down here of course they're all available

4:25 okay let's talk about promoting your mini session now obviously you want to get the word out and let people know that you're available to be booked on a specific day and there are limited time slots so the link right here this booking page this is what your clients will see we're logged in right now but you'll see the time slots down here and i could simply copy and

4:54 this link up here i'm going to show my toolbar real quick i can just copy and paste that link and send it out on social media and people with that link will be able to see your mini session and and book you now that's one way to do it we also under manage website integration at the very bottom down here we have mini sessions where you can get the code

5:21 so you can link to specific uh mini sessions or all of your mini sessions and you might want to link to all your mini sessions like let's say what you're doing you know friday and saturday mini sessions two different locations different time slots you can grab that link and i'll do that and go there and here are all of my public mini sessions available right now and so it looks like

5:48 there's three there you can also just get the link for one of them so completely up to you okay let's talk about managing your mini sessions so if you go to manage bookings mini sessions are actually going to show up here and you'll see this blue mini indicator you can also uh say hey i only want to see mini sessions by unchecking things

6:17 in check cherry and so it'll show you what slots are available and not um just give you an overview and here's one that i have some slots booked if you will so i'm going to go ahead and click that that's going to take me back to that overview page and from the overview page there are some things to consider like the settings can be changed at any time you can edit the description and

6:41 so on add something you can override the default terms for your mini sessions and so maybe for some reason you're doing a corporate gig or something like that and people need to book small time slots certainly you could make an adjustment here each mini session also has a messages tab where all the emails that get sent out related to a mini session thanks for your payment booking

7:07 confirmations by the way you can customize all that stuff under our automated messages you can send text reminders all kinds of great stuff that'll all show up in messages you can also send all of the people that have booked with you a email and perhaps there's a last minute change or something of that nature that's an option and so also when i go down to the slots

7:36 you'll see it tells me if something's been booked or not and so i can manage and i can reschedule or change times so this is pretty common but i can also show uh the actual booking and one thing to keep in mind is once a mini session slot is booked this just becomes a regular booking in Check Cherry so if you're doing regular sessions with us or other bookings

8:01 this is going to feel very familiar and i'm not going to spend a lot of time covering it but you can do all kinds of stuff and we have other videos on managing bookings but let's reschedule so let's say james calls me up and he wants a different time slot so i can reach schedule and i can choose an existing slot to reschedule for a different session so again if you're doing

8:24 friday saturday something like that you might want to pop them to another day or for the current session um see it says here this is the current session this is already booked say oh you know what 2 30 works okay let's do 2 30 james and i'm going to save you and all of a sudden now james is at our 2 30 slot so if i want to look at the mini session itself i would go back to bookings

8:48 scroll down and there james is at a different slot okay and now down here you'll see james said a different slot now also somebody might cancel and if that happens you can down here cancel the booking and permanently delete it as well so those are both options down there okay i just want to add one more thing to this video and it's related to the automated messaging

9:20 both email and text for your mini sessions and we have several videos on automated messages you'll find them under automated messages and when it comes to mini sessions if you want a message to be sent based on a mini session just go there click edit and you'll see this mini session tab and you say yep i wanted this to go to all my mini sessions you know potentially you would just want

9:46 an automated message to go to one mini session but i think most people are going to select all and then down and save so any mini session that is booked this automated message will now be sent out and that's it for automated messages i hope you enjoy the feature and found this video helpful thanks for watching