Imagine booking out your mini sessions without putting in hours of work behind the scenes. Say goodbye to the manual tasks, the CRMs with endless forms, to-do lists, and crazy complicated workflows. With Session, set up, and book your mini sessions in minutes.
Choose how many days, how many spots, and how you want to structure your session fees. Your clients choose an available time slot, fill out their contact information, sign your contract, fill out your questionnaire and make payment-all during booking. Session automates invoices, personalized confirmations, and reminders.
In this article we will cover the following:
- Creating a mini session
- Add session details
- Add date(s), time & location
- Reserving spots for clients
- Previewing and sharing your session
Creating a mini session
After starting a free Session trial, you land on the "Sessions" page, from there:
- Click the "+ New session" button (if you don't have any existing sessions, the button will be in the center of your screen, if you already have some existing sessions, the button will be on the top of your session list).
- Choose "Create Mini Session"
- Give your mini session a title and click the "Create Mini Session"button
Once you create your session, you will be redirected to your mini session overview page. It's empty, really empty. Let's fix that! Let's start configuring your mini:
- Let's start by adding some session details. Click the "+ Add session details" button:
Add session details
Next, we need to choose a session image, describe our session to our clients, attach a contract, a questionnaire, set our packages, deliverables, session fees, and customize our email communication. Let's do that now:
- Session Image: This can be a single image or a collage of your work.
- Session Description: Describe your session to your clients
- Contract & Questionnaire: Attach a contract and a questionnaire for your clients to sign and fill out during booking. If you have not create them yet, you can save your changes and return later once you have them.
- Packages and fees: You can offer a single package or multiple. Collect a retainer or the full fee during booking. You can also choose to collect payment outside of Session. Make sure you have configured your payment (Step 5) before setting your packages and fees.
- Setup Payment: If this is your first time creating a session and you have not yet setup your method of payment for collecting fees, you will have to do this before setting your packages and fees.
- Email Communication: Customize the email notifications that are sent to your clients for this particular mini.
Once you are done, Click the "save" button to save your changes and return to the mini session overview page.
Add your Date(s), Time & Location
The next thing we need to do is set a date for your mini session, choose the start time, number of available spots, any gap or breaks you need and the location of the shoot. Let's do that now:
- Choose the session date (you can add a second date afterwards)
- Choose the number of available spots
- Set the session start time
- Set the duration
- Set a gap between each spot
- Choose if you want the same start time for all clients. This is great for classes, workshops, and group events
- Fill out the session location (optional)
- Preview your available spots
- Add a break (optional) between your available spots
Click Save to return to the mini session overview. If you want to add a second date to your mini sessions, click the Add another date to this session button below your first date.
Reserving spots for clients
If you have spots you want to reserve and even discount for specific clients, now is a good time to do that before sharing your mini with the world; here's how:
Click on the time spot you want to reserve:
- Verify the spot you are intending to reserve is correct
- From the "Actions Dropdown Menu" choose "Reserve Spot"
- The chosen spot is highlighted
- Type a reservation note (this is only visible to you and it's optional)
- Apply a discount (optional)
- You can choose to collect payment outside of Session
- Click the Confirm Reservation button
Once confirmed, you will get a preview of your reserved spot with the direct link to share with your client, edit the reservation, and remove the reservation.
- The time and direct link to your reserved spot that you share with your client
- Reservation note, discount applied and edit
- Remove reservation
Previewing and sharing your session
To preview your mini session page, click the "Client View" button at the top of the page. This will open up a new tab with your newly created session. Feel free to go through the booking steps to ensure everything reads well and all the information is correct.
Once you starts booking a spot during preview (or when clients are booking), you will see a "Booking..." label on your mini session overview page. We hold your spots for 15 minutes once a booking has begun; this gives the person booking enough time to complete the booking without losing their spot to someone else. This 15-minute hold cannot be manually removed.
Once happy with your session click the "Share" button at the top of the page; this will open up the share window:
- This is the unique link to your mini sessions. You can copy and paste it on your website, share it on social media, or directly with clients
- Publish this session to your Booking Site and Bio Link
Managing mini sessions
Now that we went over how to create a mini session, learn how to manage mini sessions (viewing booking details, move clients to different spots, cancel bookings and more).