Listen to podcast:

Have you ever experienced the frustration of being ghosted by potential clients? I know exactly how that feels. But guess what?

I’ve discovered a few game-changing strategies that turned the tables for our students and clients, and I can’t wait to share them with you in this video/podcast episode.

Join me as I unveil the secrets behind my recent success story. One of my portrait clients went from getting ignored by 14 out of 15 leads to receiving responses from almost all of them! And the best part? These strategies are so simple that any photographer can implement them.

In this episode, we’ll delve into the specific tweaks that made all the difference:

1. Crafting a genuine and engaging first text message that sparks curiosity and invites a response.
2. Unleashing the power of a secret sauce on the Thank You page, creating a unique and memorable experience for prospects.
3. Sending a carefully timed and personalized email, exactly 7 minutes after their initial inquiry, to stand out from the crowd.
4. Following a golden rule for handling new inquiries that builds trust and establishes a strong foundation for future interactions.

I believe that connecting with clients should be a personal and authentic experience, and these strategies reflect that philosophy. It’s not about pushing sales or using manipulative tactics—it’s about building genuine relationships.

If you’re tired of being ghosted and ready to transform your client interactions, I invite you to join me on this journey.

Join our Free Photography Facebook Group ✅:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/boudoirhighrollersclub/

👇👇Check out these top 3 FREE downloads👇👇

💣6 Places to Find Your Ideal Client: https://programs.thehighrollersclub.io/6-places-ideal-clients

💣6 Things Killing Your Sales: https://programs.thehighrollersclub.io/6-things

💣Facebook Ads Strategy for Photographers: https://programs.thehighrollersclub.io/facebook-ads-strategy

About Jenn Bruno Smith:

After leaving a successful career as a ​speech ​pathologist and clinical liaison, ​Jenn moved into pursuing her business full time. ​She has been shooting boudoir exclusively for 4 year​s​ and teaching marketing and business to the photography industry​ for the last two.

You can catch up with Jenn in her group The High Rollers Club- IPS, Business and Marketing for Boudoir photographers.

Special thanks to Chicago’s #1 Newborn and Maternity Photographer. Kristin Milito Photography and Amy Maddox the Top Houston Boudoir Photographer for Sharing Her Website as a Photography to Profits client.

Transcript:

Humberto Garcia: Could. All right, guys, what is up? It is time. We are going to start the training. This is going to be one of the best trainings I’ve ever done, especially in the group. And I got the idea because I was inspired by basically just the difference between the photography studios that are able to get people on the phone and the ones that aren’t, and a lot of times they’re all equally talented. But it’s my controversial opinion that we as photographers are completely ghosting our clients and not the other way around. Okay. So by the end of this, you guys. Are going to find out exactly. I’m going to show you like the back end. I’m going to show you some pages. I’m going to show you the text messages that go out. I’m going to show you the results that you guys can go implement yourself. You don’t need any fancy software to do it. You might need some extra time if you don’t have software. But this is going to greatly increase the amount of consults and people you actually get on the phone and you’re going to get a lot more people to reply, okay, so we’re going to I’m going to give you the exact text message that you can send. At first. I’m going to tell you when to send it and like what to attach to it. The other thing I’m going to do is I’m going to tell you one actually, it’s going to be like two things you need to add to your thank you page.

Humberto Garcia: When people take action, that is going to greatly increase the amount of people that respond to you. Okay. And it’s just going to it’s going to help improve conversions because at the end of this, this is all about bookings, right? But there are steps to this. The other thing we’re going to do is I’m going to show you an email that we send about seven minutes after people inquire. This email is one of the most responded to and it gets people to take action and you’re going to see why you’re going to be like, Oh, no kidding. That’s why. And then there’s one golden rule. You guys are going to have to follow that. If you don’t follow this mean you’re basically going to just water down all your results and you’re just kind of giving money away by not booking people? Okay. So again, this is I’m seeing right now that about 80% of the people watching this are full time photographers. Another 15% are pro and then very few hobbyists. And it’s okay regardless of where you are. But I’m confident that if you guys follow this, your full time photography studios are going to get busier, you’re going to have more bookings and then if you’re part time, it’s going to help you kind of bridge the gap and transition.

Humberto Garcia: Okay. So let’s get into it. I’m Humberto Garcia, and if you guys don’t know me, I am a special operations Marine, deployed multiple times to Afghanistan and Iraq. I joined when I was 18, got out when I was 28 a couple of years ago. And in the last seven years. Is it seven years now? Yeah, seven years since I got out. I started my marketing agency photography to profits. I connected with Jen Bruno Smith through prospecting, and I partnered with her to basically launch the High Rollers Club as it is now. And if you guys know, this is our flagship coaching program for photographers and Jen teaches all the studio stuff, I teach all of the digital marketing because that’s what I do. And then I also co-founded Meet Nikki with Jen, and this is our all in one tool that we use for photography studios to follow up. So when it comes to like, you know, what to implement, I mean, I have the basically the numbers and I have data from the almost 1000 students we have in our masterminds from the hundreds of students in Meet Nikki or clients, and then the hundreds of clients I’ve had through photography to profit. So everything I’m teaching you is a lot of what we are doing right now. So nothing is old, nothing. I’m not hiding anything from you guys. Um, but I want you guys to implement this because I do want you guys to increase your leads and that book.

Humberto Garcia: So throughout out everything I do, I’m focused on, like, three main parts of the business, right? I’m focused on attracting more clients, right? That’s Google ads, Facebook ads, all the good stuff. Right? Like getting people to inquire with you and getting eyeballs. I’m also interested in conversions, which is what this training is going to be about. I want you guys to not only get a lot of leads, but I want you to convert those. And then with Jen, we are focused on client sales, right? So you get ten bookings. It’s great if there are $1,000 a piece, but wouldn’t it be a lot greater if you were at like $4,500 a piece? Right. You’re making 4.5 times as much money for basically the same amount of work. But in order to get those sales, you have to convert clients. And that’s really what we’re going to focus on here. Okay. So in the past, I have talked to a lot of photographers and I and I and I still work with a lot of photographers. And one of the biggest things people say is that they just don’t know what to send. And that is basically the biggest problem people have is I just don’t know what to send, even though like when we talk in circles or when we talk in groups, we know what to send, right? We’re supposed to send stories.

Humberto Garcia: We’re supposed to send social proof information on how the sessions work. Answer frequently asked questions, but when it comes time to like type them out in some sort of sequence, we just freeze and we don’t do anything. And I’m going to help you streamline that and just kind of give you a bullet point checklist. I’m going to even give you what to write for some of your emails. Okay. And what we really need to have when we’re working on this is we need to have a conversion mindset. And that means that we’re not just focused on the lead generation, but, you know, as much focus and effort we put into our photography. A lot of you guys are badass photographers. If you guys can, by the way, can you guys share your websites in the chat? What I want to see some of your work after this. And I mean, I know some of you guys want a network and you guys will see where people are, but yeah, some of you guys are badass photographers and put so much work into the photography side, but very little work into following up, right? So we get all these leads, we do all this networking, we do all this work, and then we barely follow up, okay? And that’s what we’re going to fix with our conversion mindset. Okay, So follow up is going to be a priority. And when we do this, leads are actually going to respond or a bigger fraction of them, your stress is going to drop because you’re going to have more bookings.

Humberto Garcia: Things are going to become more predictable, right? Because you’re not going to go, you know, weeks without booking people, especially if you already have leads, your revenue is going to increase. And then follow up becomes fun because you start getting into the mindset that you need to get no’s from people. You need to get answers from people. I’d rather have if you get 100 inquiries in a two month span, three months, whatever the month span is, I rather have 80 of those tell you no and 20 of them tell you yes. Then having like five yeses and like 95 maybes, you need to get people to. Tell, you know, because when you do that, you’re going to get the other 15 extra bookings to tell you. Yes. And that’s what we’re going to focus on. So we are going to focus on, number one, the conversion experience. Right. Because a lot of times in our mind, we we have it that like when leads inquire, they are supposed to answer all our phone calls and respond to our emails and just be these like perfect little robots that go through our funnel. And that’s not the case. We’re going to focus on automated email and text, but just keep in mind, even if you don’t have an automation tool, you can you can absolutely use free things like your Gmail.

Humberto Garcia: You can use Zapier, you can use text message. You know, you, you can do this on a budget and just take more time from you or you might need an assistant. And then the other thing we’re going to focus on is calling leads and getting them on the phone. Because ultimately, unless you’re selling things on like a $99 sale, $50 sale, you’re not going to get a lot of you’re not most of us aren’t dealing with checkouts like, you know, like a ecommerce store. We’re actually having to talk to people at least at some point. Even if they do do like that, you’re going to have to get them at some point. Okay, So most photographers wing it. Okay. So I have literally seen I have seen studios that have told me, hey, when a lead comes in, they basically. Just whenever they get a chance, they email them this template in their Gmail. Okay. They might call them once, maybe. Most studios that have not worked with the High Rollers Club you guys have. I mean, some of you are guilty of this even before joining the High Rollers Club. Ask any of our masterminds. People don’t call. And there’s good reason for it, because if you’re getting a bunch of no’s or people aren’t answering, then it’s kind of like demoralizing, right? And the reason one of the biggest reasons people are getting no’s is because there’s so much time between the moment that they inquire to the moment that you call them or email them back.

Humberto Garcia: And there’s just so much time and like the iron’s not hot anymore and you’re not striking when it’s hot. So that really is lowering our conversion rate. Okay. We’re afraid to leave voicemails. I’m going to tell you what you can leave in voicemails as well. And we we basically label all of these leads as being poor quality. Okay. So I’m seeing here that about 45% of people that just answer the last question. They say that almost everything is manual, 47%, 16% say that barely, but they try. So it’s not very automated, but they try. That’s better than nothing. And then 36% say, yes, it is all automated. Okay. So pretty good mixture of there. But most people are on the not at all or barely. And when that happens, we basically get poor results and confusion. Right? Because we don’t know what to troubleshoot. Like is it our ads? Is it the lead? Is it, you know, the market? Is it the stock market? Is it the jobs market? Is it, you know, Grandpa Joe Biden? We don’t know because we’re not following up with people and because we’re not in the lead, quality’s basically desegregating. It’s just becoming lower quality over time. Right? From your contact points, we start troubleshooting everything.

Humberto Garcia: So you might have a campaign that was working and then you just start believing, stop believing in in it. And it’s really hard to troubleshoot when your follow up and your basically your phone calls are not good. Okay. So we’re going to fix that. Okay. And how do we fix that? And for me, I’m a big advocate of like I always look at who’s doing the best, who’s winning at this. Okay. And I might look at other markets. And now I have so much data with photographers. I work with so many photographers that I kind of see, you know, a lot of the similarities between the super successful and at the beginning, basically, they plan every step. Okay. We focus on the experience. They use a lot of video. They automate as much as they can and they make sure that leads know exactly what the next step is. So what does that mean? Right? When someone’s coming from the journey of even having the idea of having a session with us, there’s a lot going on, right? They might come in for newborn maternity boudoir. They might come in for, like, bridal boudoir. You have to focus on, okay, when this person’s coming in, what are the biggest issues that they’re having? What are the biggest objections? Fears. Do they know what the next steps are on my website? Do they know exactly how to book with me? Right.

Humberto Garcia: So we need to focus on that conversion experience. Basically, every single transaction, every single form submission that you have is a one on one communication between you and them. A lot of times we set things up and we think that we set up our website and it’s meant to broadcast to 800 people over the month. That’s not true because every single person that picks up their phone, every single person that goes on to your website, it’s one person logging in independently, reading through your copy, reading through your site, reading through your calls to action and making the decision. Okay, So on your website, you need to have multiple calls to action. You need to make it very clear and obvious what it is that is going to happen, what the next steps are to work with you, what the process is going to look like. Right? So they’re not just guessing. And I actually brought up two examples. I actually messaged Amy and I asked her, I said, Can I show your website because she has an exit pop up. This is one of the newest landing page builds. Not only does she have absolutely beautiful work, she has video, she stands out, she fully highlights and embraces what separates her from others. Right. Like, how does she stand out? Well, one thing is she solves a problem of having just this unlimited, you know, endless closet of corsets, wings, props, lingerie sets, and they handle everything for them.

Humberto Garcia: Right. So one of the biggest reasons people don’t book their answering in the forefront. They’re doing it through their ads. They’re showing that through their website. They’re showing that on the phone, consults all their follow up. Okay. They’re using a lot of social proof. If you guys see a lot of our students in the Mastermind, a lot of the clients I have that we do builds for, I mean, we show a lot of social proof. People want what other people have. And if you can solve other people’s problems, like minded people, they’ll see the same. One thing I absolutely love that we’re starting to add is a retouching before and after drop a one. If you guys think this is amazing, Amy is one of the first people to let us do this but drop a one if you think that’s awesome, depending on what platform you’re on, I recommend maybe adding something like this. Before and after transformations an absolute must and you know, even showing like what you want to sell. Right. A lot of times I get photographers that tell me I, I get all these low quality leads. They had no idea they had to buy prints. They had no idea do wall art. And my question is, do you show that at all or all your images digital? Are you showing that in your testimonials? Are you showing that in your mockups, on your website, on your follow up on your ads? And they just have so much social proof you can imagine like they are going to get a lot of inquiries.

Humberto Garcia: Okay. So really good example. It’s very clear to see exactly the buttons stand out. They have multiple calls to action all over their site. They’re just a really good example. And even if you don’t want to do that, they have their phone number, they have, you know, they have a chat bot, they’re getting inquiries every which way possible. Okay. So make it very easy to understand what the next steps are, what makes you special, and you know what to do. Tell people what’s going to happen. Let’s see conversion options on every page of your site. That’s one mistake a lot of people make is they don’t put they don’t put forms on every page of their site. And if I go through some of our clients, I can see that people are inquiring from every single page, the FAQ page, the about page, the blogs. They’re inquiring basically from anywhere. So you want to make sure that you’re not wasting page clicks because a lot of people won’t visit a lot of pages. You want people to inquire. So you need to make it very obvious, kind of like that slide. Okay, so now they’ve inquired, okay, they have inquired and I’m actually going to ask you guys a question for this one is how many inquiries do you guys get per week? Right? Because this process is going to be very different depending on where you are in business, right? Because if you get very few inquiries, right.

Humberto Garcia: I’m seeing a lot of zeros, a lot of one through five. If you’re getting a lot of or very few inquiries, every single inquiry becomes that much more powerful. So everything I’m saying to you becomes more magnified, right When I’m working with a studio, gets 3 to 8 inquiries a day, and their stuff isn’t perfect. They don’t want thank you videos. They don’t, you know, they can get away with it, right? Because basically they just have sheer numbers. So even if a smaller percentage of people get on the phone, they can get away with it. Of course, I would love for them to call instantly, like follow all the principles I’m teaching. But if you only get 1 to 5 inquiries a week and half of them ghost to you or you ghost half of them like I’m suggesting you are, then you mean you’re going to suffer the consequences way more than the studio getting 20 plus a couple people getting 20, plus 10 to 20, but the majority are getting 0 to 5. So what what happens next? And again, this is extremely important from those people, zero to 1 to 5. And obviously even more important for the people getting more, because you know that just that’s more profit represented.

Humberto Garcia: All right. This is the reality. The reality is, is that your clients are 100% real people. They’re busy. And for the most part, they really do not prioritize you. And for good reason, right? Like I’m a dad. I have work to do. I have my daughter to take care of. I tutor my daughter. You know, I have my parents show up at my house. I go to my I hang out with friends. There are so many things that I’m doing that once I inquire, if you do not contact me immediately or you don’t continuously contact me, you are not going to get a sale. And this is true for basically everyone. And you guys tell me like, what is your life situation? A lot of you guys are business owners. Some of you guys are part time, have other businesses and are at work half the day. So this is happening the same with all the inquiries you guys have. They’re laying in bed, they’re multitasking on their way to work. They’re sitting in traffic inquiring with you. We reach out one time and then we think they’re bad leads, but in reality, they’re just normal people. Okay. So the most important time to follow up is within the first five minutes, because the moment they inquire, that’s when their interest level was like super, super high. That was when they had the highest amount of interest in whatever you’re selling, right? Boudoir, any genre.

Humberto Garcia: And you guys tell me like, do you guys have part time jobs? Are you guys busy with work? Can you see how this would be the case for you? Not just your boudoir clients or your newborn maternity? Okay. And I’m going to share those results that I just got for that last poll. So. Somebody inquired. They’re real life people. They’re busy. Why would you stand out? Right. And most of them, a lot of them, especially if maybe they came from Google, they might have inquired with several different people. So why would you stand out? Why would you think that? Of all these websites they didn’t bookmark that. They went and hit the submit button. Hopefully they hit your submit button along with maybe 1 or 2 other. Why would you stand out? And you guys saw like with Amy, right. We use video. She has impeccable branding, right? Chris is another good example. I mean, this is a current redesign we did a couple weeks ago. I mean, does this stand out to you? Right? Is it easy to understand what’s happening? Would the reviews stand out to you? Right. Um, you know, obviously you can meet the photographer. Does it do you remember, Chris? Is it more likely that you’re going to remember him because of his before and afters? And then the same thing with Amy, right? And the video testimonials, a lot of these going through a rough breakup.

Humberto Garcia: Someone who else? Who is unbelievably nervous. Right. So all those same concepts. But on top of that, on top of just the branding, the feel, what makes the studio special? Like, do you have industry leading work? Are you solving people’s problems? Do you have an X factor that you can highlight? Kind of like Amy’s closets? And you need to highlight that through all your follow up, through your phone consults, through your text messages, and you can also do that with your reviews and testimonials. Okay. But you need to be quick because remember, they’re probably, you know, inquiring with a lot of other people. And even even if you’re super talented, there’s a lot of other talented people. And it’s my position that if you are not the first person to contact them, the first expert, the first person to like have a consult and really listen to them, somebody else is going to do it. And even if that person is not as good as you, they’re not going to like you or know you or trust you as much as the other person. That’s ultimately what people are picking on. Okay. So you need to stand out so it’s not enough. Once they inquire, you need to contact them as quickly as possible. And hopefully when they got on the phone with you, you had all of these elements in your branding, on your landing pages through your experience to make sure that you got the inquiry and I’m even going to show you.

Humberto Garcia: So the example and the person that like kind of inspired this, I think they told me they had they’ve had nine book sessions, newborn and maternity. She’s she was actually one of our first newborn maternity mastermind students. And she actually volunteered to be the demo. So she’s actually our demo student. And one thing that’s really increased everything is just adding a simple thank you video that explains exactly what’s going to happen. They get a text messages, a text message. Within a couple seconds, they get an email and she’s just outlining very simply who she is, what’s about to happen, and that’s it. Nothing super complicated. Don’t need to have. It’s only a 22nd video. And then she tells them, Hey, the next thing you can do, you can either schedule right here or I’ll be calling you. And you’d be surprised. Let me actually pull this up. These are the leads. Starting today and going back, I can click on almost every single one of these and almost every single person has replied scheduled a consult. Replied. Scheduled a consult. Replied scheduled a consult. One person cancelled replied. Mean since putting that video up and since making the couple tweaks I’m showing you. And by the way, she just moved over to meet Nikki.

Humberto Garcia: All of this is on Meet Nikki, which again, you can do this all manually yourself. You can see that all these leads, she’s getting a tremendous amount of leads because she’s super talented. She’s running paid advertising like we teach in the in our masterminds. This is the only lead who hasn’t responded or scheduled their own console in the last couple days. Out of like the dozen I’ve just shown you. Okay console complete replied and console complete. Okay. So this is not by accident, right? Every single step of this was you know looked at and the money really is in the follow up because a lot of people what reporting tool was that but that is meet Nikki by the way guys I’ll give you guys a link at the end of this. You know, if you guys want a 30 day trial, I have all the templates, so I’m going to give you what to send. I’m going to show you what’s in the templates. But if you just want me to like import this into your accounts, like I’ll let you do it. That’s for you, Kelly. Kelly just asked. Okay, The money is in the follow up because the money is not sitting on the dashboard. Right. Like you have to talk to all these people. So the money is in the follow up. Uh, let’s see. Stop sharing. Okay, so we got those answers. Okay, So how are you going to follow up? My suggestion is that you, number one, be super consistent and you prioritize email.

Humberto Garcia: And email is great because it’s very inexpensive. You can do this through almost any program. There’s a million we use Meet Nikki because it’s super powerful and we can do texting at the same time. It’s usually pretty inoffensive. So, you know, it’s not that crazy, you know, compared to text message. You can basically email people like almost every day the first week when they inquire, you can’t text them every single day, right? So it’s usually pretty inoffensive compared to other things. Super high leverage. You write one thing and you spend a little bit of time, you know, writing a story, sharing some reviews, sharing some FAQs, and you write that one time. And from now on, forever, every single person that inquires with you gets it. So for the amount of time and the output that you get, super powerful and again you can use flow desk makes beautiful things. Mailchimp is super easy, Gmail plus Zapier, you can even do Gmail. You can even set up a zap that when somebody submits a form on your tab or whatever you’re using, you can set a zap that will send an email from your Gmail. So super easy, you know, if you do nothing else, I suggest at least doing that. Okay, Of course I’d prefer you to use something a little bit more powerful, but you definitely want to email.

Humberto Garcia: I’m going to I’m going to show you guys what to email as well. Texting, super high open rates. Almost all the replies I just showed you guys, almost all of them are from texting. Okay. It’s very personal. You get into their phone, very high response rate. Okay. Paid versions of this. There’s probably so many of them. The ones that I’m most familiar with are Meet Nikki. I like it because it integrates with text. But in the past, up until I started using Meet Nikki, I used to use Active Campaign and Haymarket active campaign for emails and I used Haymarket for text. The only bad thing was was, Well, those tools are super powerful and I absolutely love them for what they do. They didn’t work super well together. So when somebody booked on the on Haymarket, you know, they they called. Uh, it just. It just wouldn’t, like, cross across each other. Okay, so that was the only downside. You get super powerful tools, but they, like, they’re not all in one. Okay, But there’s also a drawback to all in one, right? All in one. You might not be as be able to compete on every single one of those aspects, but it can get close and all your leads are kind of stacked on top of each other. Right? So if you communicating with them with one, you’re communicating through both. And then you can obviously use free iMessage and Android message, but you just have to be super fast.

Humberto Garcia: Have a dedicated person like with an Excel spreadsheet if you’re doing this manually. But even if you even if you had to pay somebody like ten bucks an hour to do this, 15 bucks an hour, which is probably not a 2023 wage, you’re going to get such a huge return on investment. Jennifer says that looks exactly like go high level. It actually is. It’s our branded version of it. It actually is probably less expensive than you going to go get your own account and having to pay for text messages and emails. So you basically get the benefit of our support. You get the benefit of, Yeah, of all our templates and you basically get almost the exact same cost with just, you know, just it’s more powerful just because, you know, it’s on our templates. And yeah, you basically get every advanced feature for almost the exact same price. So social media platforms, I will say this is, this is one thing that I was about to delete from this presentation because most people don’t think of it like this, but I know a lot of you guys have Facebook groups, by the way, drop. Let me know in the comments. If you guys have Facebook groups, if you guys use Facebook groups, does anyone use Facebook groups? I’ll also be answering Q&A at the end.

Humberto Garcia: So if you guys want, you can drop your questions and answers in there. One thing I’d say about Facebook groups is some of you guys are so good at Facebook groups. And to me, the biggest way to monetize them is through direct message. So direct message is almost identical to text messaging, right? And for some people, they’re more on social media more than they are on like their regular SMS. And you can see a picture, you can kind of see their profile. So I actually think it’s almost more powerful than text message. It’s free. And I suggest some of you guys do so well on Facebook groups. If you guys treated your tick tock, your Instagram, your reels like all that, the way you guys do your Facebook groups, you guys would make so much more money. And what do I mean That means when you guys get Facebook group members you should have three questions leading up to your group, right? You should be able to take those questions, get emails, get phone numbers, and put them into your CRM. I have some I mean, I love doing that because most people don’t think of those leads as real leads. But in reality, if someone goes to your website and submits your lead form and you value that and you follow up with them super quickly, like why wouldn’t you do the same thing if somebody came to your dedicated boudoir or newborn group, put their email in, told you a little bit about themselves and then joined your group, Right? They’ve kind of shown interest.

Humberto Garcia: So I suggest and it’s the same thing for Instagram and, you know, TikTok, if people are following you, if they’re commenting on you, like why would you not reach out and have conversations with them? Okay, You’re able to link your pages. You can get get emails from people you can do like link in bio. You can link people to your scheduler. It’s a super good way to basically communicate with people, almost as you would with text. Okay, so highly suggest some of you guys have groups connected to your thank you pages. Connect with all those people as if they were like you were texting them. Okay. It’s almost like a better texting mechanism just because like, your profile is attached to it and we’re text messaging, you’re kind of just looking at like a phone number. Okay. Lastly, we need to pick up the phone. One of the biggest misconceptions that people have is that they’ll basically say something like, Well, if they don’t call me or respond to me, then they’re not interested. They’re not my ideal client. And that is not true at all. A couple of years ago, I bought one of my dream cars, which was a Mercedes Roadster. It’s a beautiful white car convertible. I live in Miami. I just had to have it and I was looking for cars all over the country.

Humberto Garcia: I inquired with a bunch of different places. All right. I’m on the car gurus just looking. And of course, like, I’m working 7 to 7, right? Like 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. I’m like working out before 7 a.m. I’m picking up my daughter halfway through the day. I’m cooking dinner. I was single at the time, and there was one dealership in New York City that kept calling me every single day. They would call me and it was, I’m not gonna lie. It was a little bit annoying. He would call text, message me, leave me a voicemail call, text message, leave a voicemail. One day I was walking to pick up my daughter, so I’m walking to pick her up so I’m not with her yet. He like called me at the exact right time. It’s like 315 or something like that, and I pick up and of course he starts telling me about the car. He asked me, you know, when I’m in the market for if I want to fly up and see it. I bought the car and flew and picked it up like over the weekend. And I wouldn’t have done that if he wouldn’t have called me the other six times. Right. Because I expressed interest. I had never replied to him. And some of you guys, I mean, tell me the truth in the comments.

Humberto Garcia: Do you guys think that’s overkill? Do you think it’s overkill that he called me that many times? I’m waiting for some answers. No. Caitlin says no. Yes, yes, yes. And I’ll tell you why. I don’t think it’s overkill. I don’t think it’s overkill because I showed interest and I said, yes, I want this thing right. Because when you fill out those forms on those things, you you have to say, here’s my phone number, contact me. I want information on pricing. If I would have responded to him even once because he texted me a bunch of times, emailed me and called me and left me voicemails and would have told him, Nope, I don’t want it. He never would have called me again. He would have said, Thank you so much for your response. We’re around. Keep us in mind. Right? He would have never contacted me again and I could have gotten him off my back. And in all reality, I kind of had an open door because I never said no to him. It wasn’t until that one time it was so perfect. I was the perfect time for me that I answered the phone. And then, of course, since I’ve expressed interest and we aligned on pricing, we aligned on the color and everything, then I said yes. So same thing with you and your clients. You guys are looking for no’s from your inquiries. I’d rather you guys have a hundred people inquire, get 80 no’s and 20 yeses, then to have 100 inquiries.

Humberto Garcia: Zero. No is just a bunch of maybes because you never really followed up with anybody. And then five yeses, right? You’re going to get those three times the bookings, four times the bookings when you actually focus on getting the nos and crossing people off, labeling them, hey, this person’s a no, I can move on and now I can focus on the people that are not nos yet or are my clients. Okay, so five by seven rule, we need to follow up right moneys in the follow up, but it’s especially in the calls. So what we need to do, the five by seven rule is super simple. You’re going to call them back in five minutes. There’s no exceptions to this. I don’t care if you have 20 kids. I don’t care if you have 20 jobs. If you don’t do this, you’re just like reducing the chances of people booking you. And it’s not a big deal. You know, don’t do it all the time. But I just know that when studios do, you’re going to get more bookings. The next thing you’re going to do is you’re going to call people back five times in the first seven days. And here’s how I suggest you guys call. This is a this is the cadence for the calling. You’re going to call, leave a voicemail.

Humberto Garcia: Then you’re going to send a text message. You can just make a template right in Meet Nikki. You can just go in there, write a template and fill it in with their username and everything. It’ll say something like, Hey, it’s blank from here. I just called. This is my number. I’m going to call you back or you can respond to this text. A lot of people will just say, Hey, I’m busy, call me back later. And then perfect blank. At least you got another touch point. You can call them back later. But a lot of people, when you call them back that second time, they’re going to say, Hey, I didn’t know who it was the first time. Thanks for calling me back. Okay? Because remember, they took action. You’re not just calling people from the Yellow Pages who have no idea what you do. Okay. So I even suggest if you if you want to, you can even send that text message first. If you know that you’re going to text them, you can just send that text message real quick. Wait 20s and then call them. But it’s up to you. You can test it and play around with it. You’re also going to call leads every seven days in the first month, right? So after the first week, they haven’t answered. You’re just going to call once every seven days so you get a no or yes. And then after that, you’re going to call them back once a month.

Humberto Garcia: Okay. This is like picture perfect, like the studio that’s like rocking on all cylinders, right? Like, imagine the photographer that’s like the master of light and is flawless. This is that. But for follow up, obviously, you know, there’s like levels to this. So the most impactful one I think you can do if you don’t do any of the others is call back in five minutes. After that, it’s calling back, you know, multiple times in that first week and then doing that call pattern I just showed you guys. Do you guys think you guys can do that call pattern? Is that too much or do you think you can do it or. Yeah, let me know if you think you can do it. Okay. I’m getting some yeses. And again, if for some studios a lot of you guys put that you guys are only getting 1 to 5 leads, so it should be manageable. Right? Obviously, if you get 5 to 10 leads over extended periods of week, like your list is going to be huge. You know, it’d be really hard for this photographer to follow up with every single person, right? Like you can imagine, they’ve gotten this many leads every week before. Right? So that’s why a lot of this does have to be automated once you get to a certain level. Right. But you probably wouldn’t mind it if you had $4,000 average sale right now.

Humberto Garcia: Each one is worth that to you. You’re going to put a lot more effort into it. Okay. So we talked about it. You’re going to leave voicemails, you’re going to call leads. And the biggest thing is I’m going to ask you to refer to the last action they did. So if they filled out a form and a lot of times we put something where they can write something, right? Like, why do you want to do this? Tell us a little bit about yourself. I’ll call back and I suggest you call back. You can do it one of two ways. The first way is you’ll just call and you’ll say something like, Hey, Janet. You’re talking to her like she’s just your friend, right? It’s almost like a friend’s calling. Hey, Janet. Yes, This is Janet. Hey, Janet. I’m calling because you just inquired on my website. I saw here that you’re expecting twins in August. Are you free to talk right now? This is. This is Bob Sacamano. Right. Whoever. And they’ll say yes or no, but at least they’re going to, number one, acknowledge who they were at first and they’re going to know 100%, undeniably, that you are somebody that they can trust. Right. Because you you’re basically giving them back information that you had. So you can work on that. Hey, Janet, kind of that like intuition, almost like you’re, like expecting them to answer.

Humberto Garcia: Yes, This is Janet. Hey, Janet, I’m calling you back because I saw you were about to get in. You just got engaged and wanted to do a bridal session for your husband. Trevor. Is now a good time to talk? You know, continue. So call back and refer to the action they took and make sure that they know who you are. Okay? Um, okay, so let’s get into it. And the other way I would say is you can just jump into it. Hey, Janet, I’m calling because you did this and you kind of skipped that. Hey, Janet part. Play around with it. Um, I do think that, you know, someone just said I would never ask if they have five minutes to talk or if now’s a good time, play around with it. I’ll tell you that. If they don’t, I would just immediately say, Hey, I’ll call you tomorrow at basically set the next touch point or, you know, text them if they don’t answer. I told you guys, text them. Tell them you’re going to call and then dial back in 20s. Um, and actually, I’m not even sharing my screen anymore. Okay, So remember, people book photographers that they like know and trust and most importantly, the person that made the most recent contact when it’s time to book. I think a couple of years ago it was like 2020. One of my best friends was a mortgage lender.

Humberto Garcia: I had gone to dinner with him eight months before or. Uh, he’s not one of my best friends, but he’s like, one of, like, my best friends. Best friends. And we always talk on Instagram. He replies to everything. And I was buying a house and I posted on Instagram when like, I was closing on a deal or something like that. And he basically said something like, Hey, like, why the heck didn’t you use me? And I basically said, Dude, I completely forgot. I know we talk about this all the time, but I completely forgot. I went with somebody else nearby. They were referred and he was like, Dude, like, what the hell? And I told him I was like, Dude, like, how am I supposed to remember? I have so much going on. I have, like, so much going on in my life. I’m I don’t mean to offend you, but I just hadn’t heard from you in a long time. I hadn’t seen you post anything. I just wasn’t reminded. And when it came time, like I just completely forgot. And this probably happens to a lot of people and it happens for a lot of you guys. You guys are friends with people on Facebook and you think they should come to you. But like, if you’re not contacting them, if you’re not the last person that contacted them with recency, probably not going to have a lot of luck. By the way, we have a special guest. Kristin, are you is your mic on? Can you talk.

Kristin: Am can you hear me?

Humberto Garcia: Yeah. So I asked Kristin. She is the student demo and I asked her to come on for a couple of minutes because she just recently switched over to meet Nicki and completely changed up her marketing strategy. She agreed to like, make all these crazy website changes that a lot of people might not agree to. But yeah, if you guys have any questions, you guys can drop them. We have her for 5 to 10 minutes. She’s super busy. But Kristin, tell me, what’s it like the last two weeks? Just having all the inquiries and like what? Like kind of hurdles did you have when they first started coming in?

Kristin: Um, the hurdles that I had were just getting my automations down. But you helped a lot with that. And we, we had our automations in progress. So once we had all that getting to the leads, they started to trickle in and now they’re really coming in strong. And so I, I will go in to meet Nicki. I probably go in there like three times a day, like morning, noon, and then later because you really you really have to stay on top of them in order to get people rolling because once they inquire like they’re hot, so you have to reach out to them right away. So that’s what I do. So people what I loved most is that on my website we installed a quiz form and the quiz form, they have the opportunity to complete the quiz, get $100 off the session, and then schedule an appointment. And a lot of people just they do schedule the appointment. So then what I do is I reach out and I say, Hey, I saw you scheduled an appointment. That’s awesome. I want to make sure I have availability for your due date. When is when are you due? And then they respond back and then, um, and I’ll be like, oh, great, I if I have an opening, I’ll say, Oh, I have one opening and can you chat today? These go within 24 to 48 hours. That’s been working pretty well. And um, and then I get on the phone with them right away and I mean, of course there’s some people, there’s a, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of no’s, but there’s a lot of yeses. And the people that are no’s, it’s like they’re not meant for me. That’s fine, goodbye. And I pay attention to the yeses.

Humberto Garcia: Yeah. So, I mean, just before when I asked you to jump on last minute, you told me you’d booked nine of nine within the first 11 days, which to me, that’s a huge amount for pneumonia. Maternity like that is huge. Um, what? I mean, I know at the beginning, right, it was a little bit to get the ball rolling, but like, what tweaks did you make? Because a lot of this is like making tweaks is not just like doing one thing and then it works forever. It’s like, yeah.

Kristin: No. I go by two things like I go by timing and being available to these people immediately when they reach out and then also kind of follow their lead and go by instinct. Like if they’re ready to talk, I’m ready to talk. If they want to wait a few hours, I’ll wait a few hours. I’m really accommodating with them. And, you know, I think it’s just now tweaking the script, making sure I here’s one thing. The discovery part has been huge. Like my whole script has changed in that sense. We talked about this two weeks ago. Like I spend the first 5 to 8 minutes just listening, asking and listening questions, asking questions and listening to them. And I used to not do that as much anymore at all. So I do that and then they’re doing all the talking and then I’m like, Oh, okay, well, this sounds like you’d be a good fit. So can I tell you how I can tell you about the process and how to reserve the session? So then we start talking about that. So it’s just been a process of getting people while they’re hot, getting back to them right away, tweaking your script. If something’s not working, try it, try something else. And really, really like listening to them and paying attention to what they need and like assuring them you will give it to them.

Humberto Garcia: Somebody said, What kind of questions do you ask when you talk to them?

Kristin: I ask them. I start with ask them for permission first. And then I say, What? What makes you want to have a newborn session? Have you always wanted to have a newborn session? And then I ask, What’s most important to you for the outcome? And then I ask, How do you envision, Oh, everyone wants digital images. We all have digital images. How do you envision using them? Do you do you envision having a fine art luxury linen album, or do you imagine having some portraits, beautiful portraits or canvas or metals on your on a spot in your home that you’ve been looking at that’s blank that you want to fill up and that triggers them to start thinking about that. And then once they say, Oh yeah, that sounds great, then I say, most clients come to us for that. And then I ask them, Was there anything in particular about my work that stood out to you? And that tells you if they’re familiar with you, if they’re familiar with your studio or if it’s like a blind lead, and it also tells you how warm they are on a scale from 1 to 10.

Humberto Garcia: Yeah. It’s really awesome. Yeah. Okay, So I know a lot of people are just like this. This could probably be impossible for them. It’s just not. Describe what it was like. I don’t know, the last two months because you kind of had a lot of this and maybe you weren’t like as like hyper focused on the follow up. Yeah, just walk us through that.

Kristin: Like the before before I started Meet Nikki and this program, I was doing really well. I raised my prices and bookings were coming in and I had a great, great 2022. Um, I doubled in 22 what I did in 21. So I was confident that I could make those changes and do it. You need to really be able to hustle. You have to really like you can’t, you can’t think. You just do like no thinking, just doing. If you get an idea or someone gives you a piece of advice and it works for them, like just just do it. And that’s what I did. So I got more and more advice, got it from you guys. And I just don’t think just do, just do it. And it and it just worked. So plus, it’s also a numbers game. I mean, I have. I don’t know right now, like five times more leads than I had with a previous person I was working with per month. So that’s just in the two these two, these 2 or 3 weeks. So it’s a numbers game. Um, so I think that covers it.

Humberto Garcia: Yeah. And I will say almost for those asking, almost all the leads are from Google newborn and maternity tends to be very heavy on like people searching for it and you kind of fulfilling the demand. So I do think that, you know, it is a little bit different beast than boudoir where it might have not have as much search search intent. The other thing is, is you almost put. No. Do you have another minute or no? You have.

Kristin: I have about four more minutes.

Humberto Garcia: Four minutes. All right. You didn’t put much effort into SEO. I know. When we started, like your search rankings were a lot lower and we kind of talked about that, like you were like 50 in maternity and think like 30 in newborn and you probably haven’t looked, but I’ve been like, kind of like telling you every day. Um, so, yeah. Have you done any work since we started you personally? No. So I did want to show just a little like last thing I wanted to show was some of the, some of the things I’ve advised on the like over the call is like improving the website experience. Right. For me and you we’ve went through, we’ve added a lot of products, mockups. You’ve been sending us video testimonials to add. We I showed the thank you video that you had, but even without doing any crazy page SEO, I think your ranking from newborn went up like 32 seven just by doing those small changes. And then for maternity you went from like 50 to 20. So I know you had mentioned mentioned that, but I say that to tell people like one of the biggest factors for Google is like what the experience is on your website. They want people to have a good experience. So when you focus on what this whole call is about, like the user experience, making it easier for people to take action on your website, you’re going to skyrocket, which you know, 30 points up on 30 positions up on Google and I think 23 on newborn in a couple of weeks. Like really, really good.

Kristin: Oh yeah.

Humberto Garcia: So what’s next for you?

Kristin: Um, lake within Lake within the next month or the next 24 hours. I’m finishing my fifth shoot in five days, so I’m headed off to Oak Park for a shoot. Um, but what’s next is, I mean, if the leads keep coming, the leads are keeping coming in. And if it’s going to keep booking, I’m. You just keep doing what I’m doing, and then I’m going to need help soon. So I’m going to need some help, because the busier you are, you just need someone there to follow up. I can’t be on my computer all the time or on my phone, so. And then just keep going.

Humberto Garcia: Yeah. And I would say just one last thing on the damn it. So I was reading a comment and now I forgot.

Kristin: Oh, I was just saying, you asked what was next for me, and I just said, just keep doing what I’m doing. Leeds following up with Leeds, Timing getting help.

Humberto Garcia: Yeah. Yeah. Completely escaped me. No, I was going to say, I think one thing that would help is and this is, this would be basically like me and Kristen having like a one on one client talk is I think we need more like maybe one new professional studio video, maybe like get like some B-roll, maybe like an interview with you. I’ll send you an example and then we can break that up, put it in different places and like just improve some of the assets. Because I think right now, like the cost per lead is really low. I know before you were at like over 100 and now you’re like $20 per lead. So I think improving the front end and just maybe adding some video would definitely help. So that’ll be something that I’m going to ask for you.

Kristin: Okay, That sounds good. Oh, and the next step is, yeah, after my wedding, which is in a month. It’s a it’s a studio. I’m in my home right now and I’m ready. I’m outgrowing it. And I want like a studio commercial space. So that’s the next step and just keep growing. So thank you.

Humberto Garcia: Awesome. Thank you so much for jumping on.

Kristin: Okay, cool. Bye.

Humberto Garcia: All right, guys, that I have like five more minutes, but I’m going to get through this because I know we’ve been on here for an hour. Okay. By the way, Kristin, I love that about people love working with people like that that are like, Hey, I need to just take action. I’m going to do it and just do it and get feedback and then, you know, change it if it doesn’t work. But we try things. So why does all this work? And it’s because a lot of people are not going to book with you immediately. So we have what, our cheetahs, hares and tortoises. Okay. So we have three kind of buckets for our leads. And right off the bat, 25% of people will never book with you like they never will. They inquired and like, they’re just not going to think there was like a huge study on like people going to trade show for fridges. And it was something like, you know, over 60% of people bought over two years. But not everyone bought the first day. Not everyone bought the first month and not everyone, you know, bought in general. Okay. So your cheetahs, those are the like fast hot action. They’re going to book 0 to 3 days. And depending on your genre, right, you get some people to inquire about boudoir. They’re just thinking about it, but they’re just not going to take action. But some people are. They’re just ready. It’s been on their mind. They’re go getters and they just like, take action, okay? Or they take risks.

Humberto Garcia: Your hair, those are people that are going to book in like the 3 to 90 days. So they’re not going to book immediately. They might not book on the first consult, but they’re going to book it sometime in the next couple months. And it might not even be with you. Right. Because we’re talking about you got to be the most recent contact when it’s time. And then your tortoises, they’re going to book after three months. And how do we get those people to book and what do we send them? Okay. A lot of us, what we do is our clients and our email lists and our group is basically like, imagine it’s like a cash register. It’s like a piggy bank and we make a lot of withdrawals. That means we send emails every month that say We’re running a sale. Join our contest, opt in to my list, go follow me on Instagram. We’re just asking them for a bunch of stuff. And people get pretty tired of that, right? Because you’re just removing money from the vault and you’re not depositing anything. So how do you deposit? How do you build that goodwill? How do you get them to, like know and trust you? You got to make deposits. Number one, you can start on social media. It’s completely free. My cadence, we actually do social media management for a couple clients now. We do daily posts, we do reels, and we do tens of 5 to 10 stories a day.

Humberto Garcia: We start 40 conversations Instagram and Facebook or more, but we start conversations. This is really where the bookings are going to come from. They’re not going to just come from people passively looking at your content. You need to have conversations with them. We like comment, share, reply, and basically send videos and video. Call the people that follow us. Or the people on our lists. Weekly What you can do is you can also email sessions, you can email stories, you can send out tips, FAQs. You can send behind the scenes monthly. You can maybe write a blog. You can write a blog on a huge topic. You can write a blog on a again, a client story quarterly. You can make spark pages, you can do theme sessions, you can do how to’s. You can send out guides, PDFs, and even even if you don’t want to do some of these big quarterly and yearly things, just do the weekly things over and over and over again. That’s going to be enough quarterly. You can send video recordings of you. You can just send video question and answers to questions from your group. You know, obviously, people a lot of times do Facebook lives as well. You can do an interview with one of your clients. You can do an interview. You can be interviewed by one of your employees quarterly. You can send an article. You can even forward articles.

Humberto Garcia: You can even forward, just like recent news that’s related. Right? And just maybe share your thoughts on it. I suggest once or twice a year you actually do some sort of get together. So you either get together with your past clients, tell them to bring a friend, you host some sort of event in your studio and you get some sponsors in there, but try to do something in person at least once a year. Okay. And then annually you can have like a new video. You can put together a magazine, you can put together something a little bit more chunky. But again, even if I’d rather you do the weekly things, if you’re going to do any of this, do the weekly things, and you guys can write in the comments, which ones do you guys think you guys would do? Would you guys be more likely to do the weekly or more drawn towards the quarterly annually things? To me. I suggest I know it. I know it seems daunting, but to me, what’s even harder is doing the annual things right. Because you it takes a lot of work to do. And the weekly things are just smaller bite size because, you know, you guys, you guys have a lot of content, especially if you guys are shooting. That’s why even if you’re not shooting, I suggest doing like model calls and just sharing the stories of people that you’re photographing. That’s all you have to do is just document what you do and you’ll realize that like you’re not doing anything special.

Humberto Garcia: You’re just, you know, you’re just documenting what you’re doing. So it’s not much work. And then you can ask for your business, you know, do like a correct, a direct hey, like ask you can do a sale 1 to 3 times a year, right? Maybe Mother’s Day. Black Friday, Valentine’s Day. You can pick a couple of them, but the more value you send, then the more content you can do. Someone asked, Do you do live video per day? I don’t. You absolutely can. Some people do, or at least once a month. Hey, after the console, if you get on a console and someone doesn’t book, what you want to do is you want to send some sort of follow up and you want to set a date for when you’re going to follow up. So if you ask them, Hey, can I tell you a little bit more how you can book your session, you go through your spiel, you present it, and you say, I can take payment with any major credit card. How would you like to pay? And they say, Hey, I have to think about it. You get through all the objections. At the end, you say, Perfect. I completely understand. I’d have to talk to my husband, too. So I’m going to call you tomorrow at 12 p.m. Does that work? Or the same time? But you have to set something in stone, put it in a calendar, update their little session they just had with you and send reminders to them.

Humberto Garcia: Okay. And you can basically keep sending. You can send a tailored email. You can send automations that just trigger when you do this. But you you know, you can manually write this or you can kind of send just send automation, send video testimonials, send FAQs, and then, you know, you’re going to get ghosted by some people. They’re going to tell you, yeah, I’m going to pay, and then they’re going to say, No, don’t take it personally, right? People have things going on in their lives. They have their somebody yesterday told me that their house was like flooded with like, sewage. You just never know. Don’t take it personally. Just call them back, you know, once or once every month or every two months. Okay. And then you’re going to invite them to a personal in person consult. So if you have a studio, one thing I like to do and suggest that you do is maybe a week after, just call them and say, Hey, Barbara, I was just calling to see, you know, I’m in this area. I wanted to see if you can meet up or if you’re in this area, you can come into the studio. I’d love to chat with you. Okay. So another good way in person consults are not dead. I prefer you do phone because they’re obviously a lot faster, but you can kind of use that as a backup.

Humberto Garcia: Hey, I know you’re completely on the fence. You know, come into the studio, bring your husband in, especially if it’s a newborn in maternity. Okay. That’ll probably help. Who gets the clients? The person who contacts most recently after purchase intent and the person who contacts most frequently in a persuasive way. That’s why I’ve given you guys that list. Stories, testimonials, case studies, you know, valuable information, answer all the FAQs, answer all the objections that people might have. Okay. And how do you I suggest you have 70 touch points per year. So when somebody knows about you, I want them to basically hear back from you at least 70 times per year. But I’m going to show you how to do it 400 times. And you might be thinking like, what the hell? I only, like reach back out once a year, right? And I’m going to show you how to fix that. Okay. So you can send hopefully at least one email weekly or at least once a month That puts you between 12 to 52. You can text 3 to 12 times, right? That puts you at anywhere from 15 to now 64 touches. We talked about the calls. Now that puts you at 21 to 481 touches and then posting and being consistent on social media. Right. They’ll see your stories. They’ll see your posts. That could add another couple dozen touch points where they just kind of see you passively retargeting ads, super powerful on Facebook, especially some of the genre’s especially like maternity and boudoir.

Humberto Garcia: You can’t really do retargeting on Google ads. You probably can, but it’ll very quickly get taken away in most cases for sexualized or like personal health issues. But retargeting ads, absolutely for basically every other genre, Google ads, but definitely Facebook ads at least you can always mail people, right? Especially your past clients and then your in-person events. To me, doing an in-person event like that’s the equivalent of like if you meet somebody in person, that’s the equivalent of like ten emails, right? All at once. Because now they see you, they see all the social proof of other people meeting you. Just a good thing to do. Okay. And then the end result of this is that hundreds of people know you, respect you and trust you. And when the time comes, right, somebody might inquire with you about newborn session or boudoir session today, but they might not do it. You might stay on your email list and you’re just kind of always in the back of their mind. When that topic comes up. They might refer you or three years later when they have the next child or when there’s another life event and they want to do a boudoir session. You’re the person that they think of, okay, if you’re just relying on booking all of the most recent leads, hey, you’re five leads from this week. That’s not as much as the person that gets the same amount of leads and books from that pool, but also books from like all their past people that have inquired.

Humberto Garcia: Okay, so that’s why it’s so important. Those leads are not dead just because they didn’t book. You have cheetahs, tortoises and hares. Okay. And the trick you have to be interesting, helpful, consistent and organized. Okay. You need to use stories to convey your message and you need to answer the real objections people have. Okay. Just think to yourself, when somebody sitting at home and they’re about to go to sleep and they’re thinking about a boudoir session, a new board session, what real issues are they thinking about? What would hold them back from booking? Is it their size? Is it that they don’t know how to pose? Is it that they usually hate photos of each other? How can you help answer those things? To me, the best way I’m not like the best copywriter in the world. I can’t just, like, make up a scenario and just convince people. I just tell stories. And if you guys are on my email list or the high rollers or even our posts, you’ll see I share a lot of stories. And that’s why I share Kristen’s story, because it’s really easy for me to just say, Hey, you should do this 100%. This will happen. But the truth is, I it’s easier for me to tell it through a story, right? Okay, so the old way leads come in, email them once and maybe we call them if we’re not scared.

Humberto Garcia: Compared to the new way. Right. And we’ve talked about how to transition your business. And again, you can do this all manually as well. Okay. But I want you to be certain when you call people, I want you to be certain in your follow up. They have raised their hands and said, I want to work with you. I want you to be warm. That person on the other side, they’re your prospective client. They’re usually always right, even if they’re not. And don’t take anything personally. Okay. Be easy to work with. Kristen said she accommodates people. Just be understanding. Everyone’s going through different things and some people are going to be nasty, but you don’t have to be. Don’t take it personally, right? If they’re nasty with you, like, what do you think their family’s going through? Right? Like you don’t have to deal with them every day. Just chalk it up to that’s just how they are. It doesn’t impact you personally. And you need to have lighthouse consistency, right? Lighthouses, they go up, somebody mans them 24 over seven, and they’re always there, no matter if there are ships coming in or not. So you need to do the same whether people are booking or not, whether you have one lead or 20 leads, you need to constantly reach out to new potential clients. You need to consistently stay in touch. Okay, so we talked about it, the thank you pages, the three areas of focus, the withdrawals and deposits.

Humberto Garcia: If you guys. I might. I might. I don’t know. Would you guys want the deck for this? Might also do a Q&A for this but do you guys want the deck for this? That way you guys have the list of things. Um, and yeah, hopefully I’ll post the deck for you guys. Okay. So question and answers. I don’t know if I can, uh, how would I do that? Q&a. Let’s do Q and A. I don’t know why it’s not loading. All right. Let’s do question and answer. I’m going to go through some of these. And if you guys signed up for this, I’ll email you guys the replay. And I don’t know what’s going on with this. My Internet is still working. Can you guys still hear me? Maybe. I don’t know. My page is not working. Okay, so let’s go through some of the questions. Okay. My boudoir giveaway ads had great results until I get them on the phone and they tell me they can’t afford the experience. Seems like doing a giveaway is attracting three people. Okay for this question? Yes, there are certain degrees of like quality of leads, right? Like if you offer people like. I mean, you can imagine, right? Like you go you’re sitting by your phone and you’re offering some sort of service, let’s just say like headshots. And you have a Google, Google ad SEO, and people come and like inquire on your website because they typed it into Google.

Humberto Garcia: Like, absolutely. People are going to you know, they’re going to be a little bit more interested than you go into like a school and doing like free headshot giveaway you but you’re going to get a lot more leads from the second one, right? They’re going to be lower quality. So there are some things you can do, right? You can like adjust your your pages, maybe put like minimum purchases on it, maybe use more video, show more of your products. So people kind of just see the elevated, expensive experience. So you just kind of like subliminally kind of message that. So I do think that that is something something you can do to improve that, but you’re just going to get lower quality, It’s more volume, but you just got to kind of got to live with that, right. And get them on the phone, figure it out quickly and then get them on or off the phone. If they’re not. Okay. Does this work in Europe? I mean, why not? There are so many people that, you know, there’s exceptions for different countries. But I haven’t seen that. I’ve seen this work in Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Canada. You know, I can’t say much about like South America or South Africa or like Asia. For some reason. We just don’t know. We just don’t get that many people in the group. I haven’t had many clients from there, but anywhere else I’d say yeah.

Humberto Garcia: Okay. Do you think Facebook ad is better or Google ad do you suggest to email with video to each inquiry? I mean, if you have the time, I mean, you definitely can do personal videos. Um, there are ways to like automate it nowadays where like with AI, it’ll like change the name that you say, but you can have like one video and then like change the first sentence of it. Um, okay. Facebook or Google ads? Depends. If someone told me, Hey, you are going to have like ten consults right now, and they said you can pick there from a Facebook ad or they’re from Google, depending on the genre. I might usually say Google just because yeah, those people were like search intent first, right? Like you can absolutely generate interest with Facebook ads, especially in something like boudoir. So just depends. I mean, it doesn’t matter, but they’re both going to get you leads. One might get you more, but lower quality one might get you less, but higher quality and they cost a lot more. So it’s really just kind of a, you know, a mixed bag. Okay. Craig says I need this meeting. I’m already asked, Do you recommend calling your leads on the phone? Yes. The whole the whole training is about calling your leads. Okay. What are the best ads to offer for Facebook ads versus Google ads? What is the best ad offer for Facebook ads? Google ads? I mean, I do suggest having some sort of offer somewhere on your page, especially with like a pop up, maybe in a site link extension, maybe something off of the session fee to get them to inquire.

Humberto Garcia: I’m not so focused on what your session fee is or what you’re making upfront. I’d rather you guys have sales sessions afterwards and best ad, I mean, we do both. A lot of the studios, we do do like 50 over 50 budgets, newborn maternity. They might do more like 95% budget on Google. And like, yeah, it’s more like 98% budget on Google and like 2% unless they’re doing some sort of like maternity model call, then we’ll do, you know, way more budget on Facebook ads. Okay. What would you say is a good budget to have for Google ads? A good budget. Good budget. Like for me, a good budget is anywhere from $1,000 to 2000. But this is what I always tell people. If you have $200 to spend, right, and you set it for the month and you’re spending $200 and you book one session, your average is $4,000, you book one session on the fifth day. So you’ve spent I don’t know how much is that? You’ve spent like 30 bucks to get that booking. Why would you not increase your your ad spend? Right. Because if for that one month you get like 3 or 4 sessions for that $200 or two, even if you got 200 sessions, you’re paying $100 per session.

Humberto Garcia: Wouldn’t you pay $1,000 for ten sessions? Right. Wouldn’t you pay $2,000 for 15 sessions? Right. Because those 15 sessions, if you have a high sales average, could be worth 45,000 to $60,000 for you. That’s why like I know it’s super unbelievable, but like almost all the studios we work with are like in that range, right? Like, they’re definitely making over 20. They’re usually like 40, 50, 60. We have some making $100,000 a month. And it’s because of that like. They know the value. They’re spending $2,000 on ads and some might somebody might like gasp at that be like, oh my God, $2,000. I’m like, Yeah, but they’re making 100 grand a month, right? So it just all scales. Like, when does it start to diminish? Okay. How do I determine? I mean, that’s personally up to you, but I suggest, like, you need to be getting a return. And I always I test things. I try to do things as best as possible. I focus on like the page experiences. I focus on the social proof. I focus on the copywriting. I focus on the images you guys saw. Like you guys saw like Amy’s, uh, Amy’s ads. I don’t even know what happened to my Google Chrome. It’s dead. Let me see if I can. Somebody. Yeah. My Google Chrome is dead, by the way. I told you guys don’t have anything to sell to. You guys don’t even have a link. Don’t have anything like slides. You guys want me to sell you something? I will, but don’t really have anything to sell right now.

Humberto Garcia: Um, let me pull this up. Amy. You are. Amy. Let’s see what other questions we have. Q&a. I answered almost all the Q and A, I think. So I showed you guys for like, you know, for Amy, like we’re about to start Google ads, you know, But we had to, like, work through, set the site up properly, get, you know, all the calls to action. Like we drastically revamped this and wish I could have had Amy on but super busy. But at least she let me use her site. I message her before that. But you know, for her we might set it to 500 to $800 for Google ads and then scale it like if it’s working, if we talk to them and they’re like, Hey, this is spending. So to determine your budget, it really comes down to like, what’s your return, right? If someone I’ve seen a lot of times, right, Like people don’t have their messaging down, they don’t have good work, they don’t have good copy, they don’t have good anything that differentiates them. They just spend all this on ads. And now they blew through like 600 bucks and they’ve made zero. And then they just say Facebook and Google doesn’t work. But you guys can see just the quality difference between like Kristen’s site. Chris Connolly I showed you guys. Amy like, it’s a world of difference, right? And then they’re focused on the follow up.

Humberto Garcia: So you need to have your ducks in a row. Even if you guys join any of our masterminds, you guys will see like focus on tracking, focusing on setting up all our systems. And then we run ads, right? There are some campaigns that you can get away with, like, you know, body love project model calls and stuff that you can like get away with not doing all those, all that legwork. Um, but yeah. Kristen’s website Kristen Milito photography. She’s at this is for Dara. She’s in Chicago. Okay. Are there any posts that would be Oh, damn, I forgot about that. Supposed to show you guys that. All right. Let me actually, you cannot minimize Zoom when you are recording. Okay. I’m going to show you guys some of those text messages. Okay. Umberto, thank you. It’s been great. I got to go. Uh, awesome. Thanks, Bruce. Mary says I use pixie set for my website. Don’t love pixie set. Would you submit? I don’t know. I hate some of these, like, beginner. All in kind of like photography focused ones. Me personally, I like, like shoots. I like Squarespace, I like WordPress. I’m even going to try Webflow. I’m not in love with like pixie set and like pixie ify and some of these like other, like I just kind of put them in the pool of like super beginner, like not much control over mobile, even photo biz. I used to hate but now has actually gotten pretty good.

Humberto Garcia: So photo biz is like the lowest beginner like thing and all of Kristen’s websites done on photo biz. I’ve actually had quite a few clients on photo biz, so I would recommend photo biz. Uh, let’s see. Oh, I’m supposed to show you guys the text messages. Okay, so let me show you guys that what that would look like. And again, you guys can, you know, do this as you guys want. Let me post this. Okay. So let me show you new inquiries. And, uh, where is this? Quick follow up. Okay, So I love this text message. So I like sending an image first. So straight up, just sending an image like from Canva that kind of has like your brand name and like maybe your location and tagline. If you’re using Meet Nikki. You upload your image and then delete the text. That way it goes out with any text and then 10s later we send a text and all it says is, Hey, Barbara, this is Karen from Karen Photography. I received an inquiry. Is this the right number? A lot of people respond to that. If they don’t book, then we go and we, you know, send more, more text messages. More text messages. I try not to send links in like the first couple text messages because they can get blocked. So just keep that in mind when you guys are doing that. Okay. Had one client book on a consult.

Humberto Garcia: She said she thought it was free and hung up on me. I mean, whatever. She hung up. Angela. Angelina. Oh, I just ditched that. Uh, this is great. Got to go. Okay. Got to go. All right. What should your. What about Zenfolio? Yeah, I’m putting Zenfolio definitely on the pixy set list. Um, but, yeah, just. I mean, honestly, you guys don’t have to use this. I recommend just texting them as if you’re messaging one person manually. So just imagine someone inquired, like, what would you text them? But you guys can screenshot those you guys. I’ll send you guys the replay if you guys are on this. You guys are definitely getting the replays. I’m not going to sit here and copy and paste all these. Um, you don’t have if you don’t have a VIP group, just get rid of that one. This one usually works really well. You can even send it like, Hey, you know, hey, first name. Is everything okay? And just leave it at that. I actually kind of like that better without this. Hey, is everything okay, Brandon? Whatever. The name is so pretty easy. Um, I think this one’s mainly for boudoir bucket list. And this one gets a lot of replies almost man. A lot of if people aren’t replying to the other ones, just getting something that says like, Hey, are you okay? It’s going to work really well. You don’t even need to put your name in there. Just get just get them to reply.

Humberto Garcia: Okay.

Humberto Garcia: But yeah, someone said, Are you interested? Are you still interested? Works. I would say that that’s kind of in line with that. Okay. So, Dara, hopefully that helps. By the way, I am going to provide for you guys have this list of 100 email subject lines. Let me see if I can find it. 100 email subject lines. That you guys can have. Okay. And I’m even going to show you guys that like one of them, I mean, it got so many bookings. I think I think one of these emails have you guys know me? You guys have probably seen this. I shared this last week, but you guys are here now, so I’m going to share it with you guys. So here’s 100 subject lines. You guys can copy this. Whatever. Okay. But this line right here. Are you busy? April 15th. I mean, this one by itself, booked like over ten sessions for one photographer and it got like 60 replies. So we just sent an email that said, um, subject line. Are you busy, April? I think it was April 22nd. Are you busy? April 22nd. And then the details were like, Hey, I’m doing this special session with this style picture if you’re interested. I have five spots. Reply to my email with your phone number and I’ll tell you how you can book. I’ve sent this on a Friday. Got like 63 replies. We got so many replies that like the person couldn’t answer. She said, Just send them a PayPal link. We set up like a shitty PayPal link for 99 bucks, sent it to everybody with like a sentence snippet and said, Hey, pay this and then we’ll talk.

Humberto Garcia: We got over ten bookings and completely filled up our little mini sessions, so it’s a good example of an ask. The reason these are so good is because these are meant to like tell stories, right? So you can see like, did you see this? Put your story in there. What do you think? Ask for an opinion. Bethany just said this review What do I wear? Faq kind of question. Hair and makeup details about that. Right. New five star review. Share that. Jessica just said this. Are you free? Guess what happened today. Tell a story. All of these are meant to tell a story or provide value. Why Kelly cried today. Like, who’s not going to open these? So you’re going to get really high open rates with these. Um, so yeah, inspiring story. The perfect accessory. These are just prompts. So don’t even need it. I mean, I can’t tell you guys what to write in every email because every single studio is different. You guys have different personalities, but the thing you guys can share that’s unique to you guys that’s pretty easy is just use the stories from your clients and stuff, okay? Um, and it’s pretty easy, right? Because you’ll get this template from me if you guys, you know, do use me. Nicky will help you onboard. We’ll help you get set up, You know, we’ll give you a phone number. This also records your calls. Uh, let’s see. Why is it not saving? Of course it’s not. Let’s go back. Error while saving, Of course. Why would it save? Can you.