How Streak helped this photographer capture 50 weddings in a year

TLIC Media is a wedding photography and videography business that provides media services to customers across the entire East Coast. Founded in 2017, this creative company goes above and beyond to capture moments that last lifetimes. 

There is no one way to put on a wedding and that same logic applies to how these special days are documented; TLIC seeks to provide a bespoke experience, starting from the moment a couple discovers their services, leading up to the big day.

Downsizing from 20+ apps to one client management tool

TLIC got their start promoting themselves to couples on the Wedding Wire. They used Honeybook to track communication with customers and log the details of each sale. As they grew their business, they started using a handful of other tools to operate successfully and provide a tasteful customer experience along the way. Eventually they had over 20 different applications strung together just to manage their clients - no to mention .

They knew this wasn’t sustainable. The owner, Chris, explained that “we wanted to use as few programs as possible. I wanted something native within Gmail to communicate with clients and have it be organized and streamlined.” 

Chris searched for a tool that would allow him to communicate with customers inside Gmail, build off an API, and consolidate his system into one simple app that he could have total control over. He landed on Streak, which helped his team drastically reduce the number of tools needed to provide an exceptional customer experience and manage his clients in Gmail.

Automating customer outreach with personalized messages

TLIC photographed 50 weddings last year and communicated with up to 80 clients and leads each month.

In order to streamline his communication with customers, Chris created a handful of snippets in Streak based on common inquiries and messages he received. Next, he used the Streak API to schedule customized messages to his leads at various stages in his pipeline. 

Automating their messaging meant that the TLIC team could send customers in the ‘Quoted’ stage different messages from customers at the ‘Wedding Date Booked’ stage. They also used variables from their contacts and pipelines to customize each email so the customer felt like they were receiving a personal message. Best of all, this worked even when they were sending an email to 20+ leads in his pipeline.

Chris’s method was that “every time I realize I'm doing something more than once, I think about if I can insert a snippet, or can I create an API call. That's the power of Streak, [it gives me] flexibility in automations, either natively or via Zapier, to make those connections.” Ultimately, this saves Chris and his team time and gave them more time to focus on providing special day-of experiences to their customers. 

Analyzing data in new ways

There are a handful of data points the TLIC team tracks for each customer throughout the sales process and the big day. The team’s pipeline consists of custom columns to track these data points and dropdown columns to drill down and filter for specific data, like the source of a lead. 

What really upleveled their pipeline, though, was the use of formula columns. 

Formula columns allow a user to enter a formula which then returns a value. They can be used to calculate math within each row of a pipeline, refer to other cells in a pipeline, and more. They’ve set up formulas to calculate payments, payment plans, commission structures, and package pricing. They also use their pipelines to calculate averages or sums so they always know how much revenue they have at each stage of their pipeline. 

Building formulas into the pipeline has taken pretty much all math out of their daily work.  Not only does this save Chris and his team time and mental energy, but they also avoid errors by letting Streak crunch numbers for them.

Customer experience above all

Providing his clients with an exceptional experience is one of Chris’s main priorities. He's trusted with capturing lasting memories of a really special day for each client, after all. By consolidating tools, automating his systems, and having better data, he can focus on his priority: capturing beautiful photos and videos.