Using Light Blue to help send a festive message to your customers

As Christmas approaches, many photographers are turning their attention to contacting their customers in order to send their season’s greetings. You’ve been adding information to Light Blue throughout the year, and now’s a perfect time to get that information to go to work for you.

Using Light Blue you can find the records of customers who matter the most to you, and then use various tools within Light Blue to send them a festive message.

Querying for records

In an earlier blog post, I wrote in some detail about using the query dialog to dig deep into your data & find records that you were interested in. You can design a query to find the contacts that you’re interested in reaching – perhaps all of your customers who’ve spent over a certain amount?

Once you’ve found the records that you want to send something to, you can use Light Blue to help you to reach out to them.

Printing address labels or envelopes

Printing your customers addresses onto labels or envelopes en mass is really simple. After performing your query, simply click Print/Send and choose the Labels / Envelopes option to print all of the primary addresses of your main contacts onto labels or envelopes.

Using mail merge documents to send a personalised letter

You may want to send a personalised letter that you plan to enclose in a card. We’ve got a handy tutorial all about using your own word processor to generate template letters:

There’s also a comprehensive list of all of the mail-merge tags that you can use in Light Blue, which will populate your template documents with information from your records.

Exporting email addresses to Mail Chimp

If you plan to send out a lot of emails in one big festive mail shot, you could export a spreadsheet of your customers email addresses to upload to something like MailChimp. Using the results of the query you ran earlier, simply click File > Export Email Addresses to save a CSV spreadsheet which can be uploaded as part of an email campaign.