Maximize Your Mini Sessions with Check Cherry

0:10 PE B is chat um so I've got some slides and then Matt's gonna do a demo oh I better turn this off hold on hold on hold on um PE and Matt will be on here shortly e e oh there he is I just texted

2:08 him hey man I just Ione coming yeah okay so let me get you can you see my uh slides there Matt yep okay cool um yeah so uh this webinar we're doing tonight is on mini session and check Cherry's feature around mini sessions um the short of it is this is a popular time of year for Min sessions we get a lot of use with the holidays and so on and we also have

2:43 um a new feature um you know or enhancement to many sessions which we think people should know about uh great way to earn extra money and so on so we'll we'll cover that as we go on but um for those who might be curious and you don't know what a mini session is um the thing is I think of it like there's one predefined date and you're going to service multiple customers so

3:07 you're defining the date you're saying hey I'm going to be here kind of like a pop-up shop type thing and uh you can book a slot with me and so if you kind of ever trying to want wanted to run an operation or an event like that or a a session uh mini sessions can really help and examples would be like family mini sessions for Christmas cards and so on Santa photos corporate head

3:29 shots and again just general popup sessions and photography um and check TR makes it easy for you and your clients to schedule Min sessions pick slots all kinds of stuff um and we'll do a demo shortly but the family mini sessions for example um so this would me if you're a portrait photographer um you might say hey I have 10 slots available I'm going to be at you know notable

3:53 Park uh doing photography one family per slot and each session is 15 minutes right so it's a really a short hence the ter mini session um and they're going to get five edited photos this is just an example so everybody's going to do it a little differently um and then they might charge 150 bucks so to speak so in one day at the park you're servicing uh 10 clients or 10 families

4:19 basically at 15 minutes each you go home you edit you send your stuff out all that stuff um and family minting sessions are are popular with photographers um I think in a couple of ways one is um it's a really great way to attract um new clients right because you're coming in at a more affordable rate than your full sessions um and then you could Market to them later and then

4:43 obviously you might have uh just repeat customers who are always mini session hey I can't afford um a full session for photography for Christmas but if you do minis let me know put me on your list that type of thing um Santa mini sessions um and so imagine um you know it's the holidays and we see people doing this right now um you might say hey there's 10 times slots available

5:06 it's it's 15 minutes each but I want 10 bookings per slot um and this is that new feature we mentioned and the reason you would do this is because you don't necessarily want H to have like a one or two minute slot range right CU somebody's going to be late there's going to be a hiccup whatever it is and so you can kind of group your bookings in a Time range um and it becomes

5:30 really helpful just to make things run smoothly and let's say with the San mini session they get one photo or digital prints three of them whatever it may be um and you charge 15 bucks or something they could book the book the uh the session and then and then pay 15 bucks when they book um maybe you've partnered with a local Christmas tree farm and you've hired a Santa you know and it's just a

5:53 good good way to earn extra money and also attract new customers right cuz obviously you're going to get their email addresses and phone numbers that type of thing um the Santa minis are pretty cool obviously it's seasonal um but we see other other uses um same idea as Santa mini but corporate mini sessions or corporate sessions basically head shots right so hey maybe I'm going to show

6:16 up for an hour six time slots available I'm going to go to your office you know Mr employer their 10minute slots three people per slot so that gives me about 3 minutes to knock it out and you get one head shot per person and in this case often times what's happening is the people actually booking their slot the employees aren't paying anything so you just set it to zero and then you have uh the

6:38 employer basically pay uh one time um I've also seen people set up uh you know at a trade show you know get your head shot um you know and so you can do that um and I've seen both uh photo booters and regular photographers you know portrait photographers that you would will do mini sessions for corporations um and obviously corporate Min sessions I mean it just makes it really convenient

7:05 for employees and employers and you get that consistent look and feel on your website marketing materials um it's great to it's you know it's a great way to pitch you know to an employer um hey I can do I can do these head shots you know it's going to look great all that stuff um and then I've got kind of like the popup sessions and so um um this is from the Check Cherry blog and

7:28 basically uh a company called dollop photooo um used our mini sessions and they rented a pop-up Studio space in a central location think of like a mall of sorts you know where there's a lot of foot traffic and then they transformed that space into a high quality studio and then sold access in short slots um they did 15 minutes uh at 30 bucks uh a person for two people they had the add-ons

7:56 system doing extra people and stuff like that um and I thought it was really cool um the output obviously was great too you know they had a lot of options uh with their photo booth and just you know props and Fun Stuff um so I thought that was really cool but I think just in general hey I'm going to be here at a certain time I'm going to service multiple people and I need you to schedule

8:18 a slot that's where many sessions come in um and so maybe if anybody has any questions you know feel free to chat at any point in time um and we can read them off but I think we also give it over to Matt um to kind of give us a basically give us a demo of how it works in check Cher um and how you might position this yeah thanks Jud that was awesome so let's see so you can share or see

8:43 my screen now right yep perfect so yeah so with the mini sessions um you know obviously it's not something I I don't think you know every customer needs or you know everybody will use but um but if you do have that that use case it's it's nice to uh to to to be able to take advantage of it so um if you want to create a mini session so from cat Cherry you know if you're on your dashboard

9:08 or really anywhere um you can start by clicking create new in the top right and you'll see that mini session um listed as one of the options and um you know it's really easy basically um pretty simple form to fill out you know we'll say that we're creating um some call Mini sessions you know at uh Prospect Park is a Lo local uh Park where um people do a lot of Photography and stuff and I've

9:34 got a description I'm going to copy and paste here um you know you can replace your image and things like that and I think you know the the imagery is really important um you know one of the things uh Jud didn't talk about but but I think is important is um you know a lot of times you're going to be sharing these on social media and so it's a great way to kind of you know on your Facebook

9:56 or you know Instagram places like that you'll be sharing uh a link to it and so it's it's you know it's a nice thing to talk about and and just to kind of Drive some engagement but um so we'll put in a description you know what's included um you know kind of any anything that you might want to um sell with um you'll see a status um generally you would just leave it public but we do support

10:19 uh private similar to how the package uh packages can be set to private and that can be useful if you know maybe you have a private link you want to give to um to a corporate event or something like that but generally we'll just go ahead and leave that as public then we're going to select the the date and time so um let's set it for you know say November 10th um we'll say I don't know you know

10:41 we'll start at 11:00 a to 7 P.M uh maybe we'll say each session is 20 minutes and we can leave a little uh buffer between if we want as well so if we want to make sure that um you know um things aren't cut too close we have a little bit of time to catch up um we can do that we can also just leave at zero if we want to you know um keep it a little bit tighter um this is the new uh feature

11:09 that we added where basically it just lets you say how many bookings per time slot can you handle and so um you can leave that as one you know that's traditionally how it worked has worked U but you can also bump that up so if you want to say hey I can do up to three at a time or 10 at a time or you know you might even say I've got like one or two bookings for the whole day and you know and

11:33 I can do uh you know 10 slots any anytime during it so um lots of flexibility with with what you put there um the price of the session so that's going to be um you know the full price um you know we'll say 150 and then the deposit amount um that can be a flat rate it can be a percent it can be the full amount and um obviously that's just you know what you want to take up front uh one thing

12:02 to kind of take it or to to include or to uh take into consideration you know if you set the full price at 150 and then the deposit at 150 um you know potentially if there's like sales taxs or add-ons or things like that um it might be a little um you know unexpected so you might want to just set it to full amount if you want to take the full payment up front um but like I say you can do

12:25 a percentage you can do a flat rate whatever works best on that and then we're going to put a um a location for that so this can be the park that you're doing it at it can be um you know studio if if you've got a studio that you're doing [Music] um there we go and we'll create that and basically once you do that it's going to to pregenerate a bunch of time slots so we've got

12:59 all the different time slots that are available um we've got our description um and because we did three slots basically there's there's three uh bookings you know potentially three bookings in each slot you can always edit it if you need to you know if you need to edit that description or if you want to um change the slots you know you decide oh I want to go up to 30 minutes or

13:23 something like that you can um you can do that at any time you can also add manual slots or you know remove these if you decide you know if you need a little bit more control um you know maybe for some reason you're maybe you're going to be out for lunch and you want to remove one of these slots in the middle or if you just kind of want to make it look a little more busy or something like

13:42 that you can you can do that sort of thing as well um once you've created your mini session um you know you're pretty much good to go um typically at that point you would want to share a link to it so um you know if you're already on the mini session we've got this sharable link option where you can um get a link to this mini session or um if you've got a bunch of mini sessions you can get a link

14:09 to all of them as well but for now I'm going to copy this link and just open it up in another Tab and um and this is more or less what the customer is going to be seeing you know it's going to have a description dates times location um you know so they can see where it's at description whatever details you included um you can include uh images and Graphics in there as well if you want to and

14:34 then you're going to um basically have a breakdown of of all the slots that are available um and then as an admin you can also see a history of of who's viewed this page so um similar to like the proposals or a few things like that you can see you know how widely is this being shared you know are people viewing it or you know is it getting any activity things like that um you

14:56 can also get um you know if you have a lot of mini sessions that you do or you have multiple dates you can also get a link to all of them so if we go to that you know we've got this um this one that uh that was already in the system and then the new one that I just created and so you can of course have different images for those but um but once somebody uh picks one of these uh mini sessions

15:22 um you know they'll be able to see what slots are available and the checkout is real simple so we'll have you know how much they owe what the deposit amount is if they want to pull in painful they can um and all we're going to collect is um the name the email and the phone um you know we'll collect your signature and so you can have um we'll take a look at where you can set your

15:52 terms and all that um we'll click next step and then whatever payment options you have set up um are going to show up here so we've got lots in our demo account but you know things like your credit card your payal um your bank account if you've enabled the a things like that will show up so we'll choose a check just to to make it easy and we'll confirm the booking and

16:14 that's it and so as the customer you know I've got my booking page and it's real similar to um you know to other bookings in Chet Cherry where um you know they're going to be able ble to see an overview of their event um any notes things like that that you set up for them they'll be able to see um if you do have things like questionnaires or even designs um you know you

16:39 can that that's all available in manyi sessions so you can take advantage of those features um the customer can come anytime make a payment um pay off any balance they owe get an invoice all all of that type of stuff is going to apply um you can also as an admin you know either uh you know from the dashboard or um or your sales bookings um you can see all the mini sessions you

17:07 have scheduled so this one coming up on November 9th you know it's going to show up uh sequentially in my calendar so I can click that and see all of the bookings that are there um I can even um you know reschedule people change times uh move them around you know if somebody emails you and says hey I need to reschedule um I can do that you can manually add people as well so if I want to add a

17:30 booking manually um you know we'll say J decided to join us we'll go ahead and and um add Jud to the list and so now I've got you know two of them booked and so hopefully you know as the day gets closer you can uh you can fill those up and and have everything um you know ready to go um as the day gets closer as well it's real common that you'll have messages that you want to send out

17:57 so we have a messages Tab and um you know that'll have your message history everything that was sent out but you can also send new messages as well so it's real common that you know maybe a day before the mini session people want to have like kind of a reminder go out or maybe you just want to send some some custom details to um to everybody I think I think a common use case is this is also

18:21 like if it rains you know what I mean like are we doing it or not it's kind of like a oneoff message that you got to communicate with everybody hey it's going to rain or like the weather's here we're going to change locations or whatever it may be and you can just communicate with everybody real quick exactly and and the way it works it'll show all you know if we had 10 people here they

18:41 would all show up and so you know we'll default to having them checked but you can also um basically if you just want to send it to a subset of people you can do that and so you know R day um you know just a heads up and then you can send your message and and be good to go so um so really easy for kind of communicating messaging things like that um and it works exactly the same as as messages

19:04 always do in chck Cherry so you'll you'll get you know a copy of any replies and those will be forward to along to you um and then if I want to go into um you know kind of the the more detailed booking page uh for a client I can do that as well and so there I can see their just their individual message thread so if I want to make it a little easier just to to see my conversation with a a

19:26 specific specific person I can do that as well um so you know it works uh real similar to the rest of cck cherry um couple of other things I think that that come up or you know worth knowing about um obviously you know in the settings you can change images or you know associate it with a different brand or change dates times all that type of stuff um it's real common we see that

19:50 mini sessions have different terms than um than your other events so um so with the you know under the terms you can override what your customers are going to be agreeing to um you know we'll pull in the default but you can uh you can customize that make changes and then um the um yeah so I guess that's it on terms and then on add-ons um you know it's common that we see people will have different

20:25 add-ons that they want to s s so um you know that might be things like if you have um allow people to bring in additional guest or printouts or things like that you can um you can offer those as add-ons and so um to create an add-on for many sessions you go to manage add-ons um you know you can create that or I'm just going to edit this existing one and kind of the the trick or the

20:53 thing to be aware of is you know this might not be something you want to add to your package bookings so we're going to go to the the package selector um you know that you kind of use throughout CH Cherry we're going to go to that and we're going to uncheck packages so it's not something that people you know booking a mirror Booth or an open air Booth see um but we do want to show it to

21:14 our mini sessions and you know kind of in the same way you can you know select a group or select you know um all of them or whatever um you can do that with with the minis too you know you can say all mini sessions or you can just check the ones that apply um and you know you set your price and and you know if there's a Max quantity or any imagery or things like that you can include that um once

21:39 you add those add-ons now if I go back to that booking page um then I'm going to see this add-on is as um available during that check on checkout process so you know if I come in I add this for five bucks um you know maybe even I changed quantity then um once I choose my time slot um now I'm going to have a list of these add-ons so three additional guests plus $15 and so it's going

22:10 to take that into account um with the uh with the deposit or the total amount um we also do support discount codes so if you know if you need to give people a discount code of some sort um you can do that uh Works real similar to regular disc codes um go to manage discount codes create one and similarly kind of the the trick or the thing to be aware of is you know you're probably not

22:37 going to want to make that code available for your regular packages you know your things your photo boo DJ Etc packages but you are going to want to enable that for many sessions so we'll turn that on and you know you can make that say 10% off or something like that and again got to put a date um of some sort and we'll say that and so now if I go to um to book one of my

23:01 minis um I can uh redeem that discount and so and I'll get uh um you know whatever the whatever the amount was 1150 discount in this case so um so real simple you know real similar to the rest of Che Cherry um and I would say kind of the last thing that comes up with mini sessions is um automated messages so um again automated messages are going to be real similar to uh you know to

23:34 a a quote unquote regular automated message but you can do things like you know based on when the booking was created so you could have an email go out to your customers um your mini customers automatically you could have reminders uh go out automatically before the date um things like payment reminders as well as well so if we did want to set up a um maybe like kind of a

23:59 confirmation email um we could choose this booking created trigger um we'll call it mini confirmation and then again with this package selector uh just kind of the the tricker the thing to be aware of is to change that to mini sessions instead of packages um you know we're going to say send this to the client account um confirmation and thank you for looking at and then we can include some

24:26 details and things like that I think a reminder is also I mean the feedback that I've heard is that just people um book and then forget you know so even a reminder via text you know an hour before or something would be helpful for people or whatever a day before I guess exactly and if you did want to do that you know you would just use this schedule date reminder and say hey I want to

24:50 send a reminder you know whatever one hour one day one week whatever um before just kind of reminding them and letting them know that um you know that you're uh that it's going to be out there um and you know again kind of the you just want to make sure that you're limiting it to the mini sessions um you can't even limit it to to a subset you know if you've got three mini sessions at Prospect Park

25:11 you might have a different email that you want to go out to those people versus um versus other mini sessions that you have um but in general I would recommend you know keep it simple don't you know there's no reason to add too many things too many moving Parts you know set up a reminder set up a a confirmation and and typically that's about all you need to do so cool we have a question it

25:32 says is this something that will work for travel agents from Tracy um and so Tracy are the mini session specifically or Checker in general um I would want to know kind of more about what your thoughts are but we don't have any travel agents using it um for bookings um but I'm I don't know much about the travel agency business so to speak so maybe can chat in or unmute yourself with kind

25:57 of what you thought maybe you know how this might work and we can give you some feedback don't you think he talk hello well I was just um listening to everything and I've been checking this out actually for about um about a month and just kind of trying to figure out how how this would kind of support my business and that's the reason why I I tuned in for this session tonight to maybe

26:21 see if I can get an answer to that question or not I noticed that it's specifically you guys specifically focused on booth and things like that a lot so I didn't know in particular if that's something that would um work for me you know I it's it's hard for us to know I mean so check allows you to do bookings um so you can take bookings and you know send proposals and

26:47 get signatures and automatically send messages the vast majority of our clients are event service providers um um I guess with travel um you know I don't know it would be a certain amount of time I mean do you have packages that you sell are they prepackaged travel deals I mean don't the rates vary based on flights and stuff like that well if I was doing a lot of um functions like around

27:10 the city and things of that nature I can see where this would really be kind of beneficial for that um I'm independent by myself with um running this and so um but I do have like um resort packages um all kinds of stuff like that cruise packages things of that nature stuff like that so I didn't know if this is something that would that would Jive but that you know my guess is no just based

27:35 on the the varying travel prices presumably if I book in a certain time of year or whatever that the cost would be vary and Che Cherry wouldn't know anything about that you could send proposals to people to collect pays and down payments and stuff like that but we don't have any travel agents using us but so I I mean I can so that's you know one thing but then doesn't necessarily

27:56 mean that it wouldn't work for you um but if you sell with packages and add-ons and send proposals and there's dates to the bookings you know potentially um it could work just chat with us from within your account if you have a free trial if you want us to extend start building out and then chat with us and we can answer questions as you're building it out okay um and how how do you

28:14 build out though that's the thing I don't I don't understand how how do you do that well um I guess it's kind of beyond the scope of our mini session the webinar so maybe what I'll do is I'll send you a note um afterwards and kind of with some video thanks Tracy yeah um does anybody else have questions on Mini sessions um has anybody used them um Ace is Ace is here Ace have you used Mini

28:43 sessions probably not um the um but I think that was good Matt I mean I I you know it's a good walk through um yeah it's kind of something you know we it's um again I don't think it's something that all or even most check Cherry customers use or need but um you know when when you do need it it's there and um you know sometimes I think it people have questions about you know what is that you

29:09 know you click that create new button you see mini session and and uh you know a lot of times people are you know kind of wonder what that is or or how it works so cool well if there's not any questions let's end early I mean I'm on that ad day yep sure yeah I've used it before like when I do like fall photography or like Christmas stuff so it works but uh um like it works like I like it

29:36 but it's not like I use it a lot to be like oh tell you that but so I'm going to test it out with the new changes that you guys put in place but my question have to just do with something else entirely is like is it possible whereby when we embed uh like a form or when people click on check availability or they're trying to fill out whereby he can stay on the site instead of going to check

30:06 Sherry subdomain because I've had issue with like some of my corporate client they'll be like oh it take us to another side and something pop up so some of them I have to send like my subdomain check Cher subdomain to them to approve it within their Network and some just just drop from them it's interesting that you would have to send the subdomain but not your own domain to whitelist it

30:30 um you know as I wouldn't see any reason why they would do that but um the short answer is you can't fully embed the online booking engine of Czech cherry and we'd love to offer it it's just um it's just kind of hard to do frankly it's going to you know it's going to take a lot of work to do it well um in general feedback is that clients don't care or don't notice um you know that's

30:52 what I would say is the feedback that we get or it doesn't impact conversion rates that type of thing you can embed a simple lead form on your website um you know that's one thing and maybe you know I don't know send them to your page yeah it's interesting that the corporate clients that's the first time I've heard that Matt um yeah that's interesting yeah yeah

31:14 and it's you know it's something we've uh we've kind of experimented with and and would like to have a fully embedded um process there there are some oddly enough it's it's less secure to do it that way ways there they're um you know in order for us to we we have a lot of different Integrations with um you know things like payment providers things like a things like um um you

31:35 know just different different Integrations that um you know could be problematic if if we kicked them off site and um you know uh making sure that everything is PCI Compliant and um secure is is you know really important and for us especially since we are picking payments and and things like that and so um you know we may be able to do more of it within the website like I think uh at least

32:07 an embedded like package type of view I think is something that um you know probably not that far off hopefully um but but getting fully embedded I think is probably and I don't think that the customer portal will ever be something that you would embed right one of the one of the problems is basically we can't you can't have links anymore like once it's embedded on your website things

32:30 like um like we have a feature where you can like resume where you left off on the booking process or you know you can send somebody a link to um you know to log in or to to access through designs or all that type of stuff wouldn't really work if it were um embedded directly within your website so yeah yeah the other one that I like maybe that I've noticed that I had same issue kind of

32:56 not issue for me but like you know I I have a background in cyber so I understand you know and I work with a lot of financial institution in the past where by oh don't click on link so is it when will it be possible or if it's possible already to have like HTML kind of a emails whereby it's not the link some of them feel scary because I just started doing more corporate stuff like corporate

33:19 head shirt and I use because I have my photo Boot and I have my photography on it and bl can I and literally this lady just specifically like oh can you send me like the way the square I can just click on the button in my head I'm like the same thing that is even hard because this one you can see exact link to know that it's not a fake link and I was trying will it be possible to have like

33:41 an email whereby we can it can be like encoded or I don't know how to put it whereby it's like it looks more nicer for them where the Bon is like you can already you can already do anchor text um okay um so chat with us and you just you know you highlight it and you can even use the merge tags and anchor Tex to link to a proposal but just chat with us you know onic issue the specific

34:05 template and we can kind of show you um but we don't support tables and full HTML Styles or anything like that but you can link stuff it's simple HTML keep it clean simple yeah okay yeah because like I was like because I know I can create the form on this different side and Link link it where by but when I send it to them I just like will he be showing HTML for them or is going

34:31 to be showing uh know text that's the only thing that I was a little bit skeptical of yeah if you if you kind of highlight it um you can add like to you know to google.com or you can even do like you know questionnaires link um and um and that'll that'll take I got a hyperlink so they don't see the full URL but so they click that I mean there's always I feel like there's always going to be some

34:55 customers that are particular about certain things you know and just I think you have to manage the exceptions and not manage by exception but I think anchor text is good you know in emails it makes it easy just click here yeah accept Now actions yeah anybody else got stuff awesome well thank you Jud for I think that was that was helpful and yeah cool okay well uh we

35:27 the minute sessions go well chat with us from within your account if you have questions thank you for joining us um we'll send out an email we'll do another webinar in two weeks um and we'll give you the update so uh thanks for joining us and uh have a good night