Enquiries

Home → Enquiries is your inbox for people who ask before they book.

Your enquiry form is your booking page's web address followed by /enquire. While the screen is empty it shows the exact address, so you can link to it from your website and Instagram.

Nothing is lost to an email problem

An enquiry is saved first and emailed second. If email is having a bad morning, the enquiry is still on this screen — which is not true of a contact form that only sends an email, and is how photographers lose work without ever knowing.

You also get an email, New enquiry from …, with an Open your enquiries button. Pressing reply in that email writes back to the person who enquired.

The email goes to your reply-to address. To set it:

1. Go to Settings → Settings.
2. Under Studio, fill in Reply-to address.
3. Press Save settings.

Without a reply-to address the email has nowhere to go — though the enquiry still arrives on the screen, and the bell in the panel still tells you (see notifications).

What arrives

Their name, email and phone, what they are after, when, where, their message, and how they found you, if they said.

Two things happen automatically:

• A returning client is recognised by their email address, so a couple who enquired last year does not become a second client with the same details. A new enquirer is added to Clients → Clients straight away.
• A rough date is kept as they typed it. "Sometime next autumn" is a perfectly reasonable answer eighteen months out, so it is kept as written rather than refused for not being a date.

Keeping track of each one

Each enquiry has a status:

To change it:

1. Find the enquiry in the list. New ones are at the top.
2. Choose the status from the menu on the right.
3. Press Set.

Set it to Replied as soon as you answer. That is how your reply time is measured — the screen cannot see your inbox.

Clients → Pipeline shows the same enquiries laid out by stage, with anything that has gone quiet at the top. It is for looking; you change a status here on Enquiries. See clients and the pipeline.

Answering one

• To reply, press their email address in the list, or reply to the notification email.
• To send a price, go to Business → Quotes, choose them under Who for (they are already a client) and write the quote. See quotes. Then set the enquiry to Quoted here.
• When they book or say no, set it to Booked or Lost. Worth doing honestly; see below.

How fast you answer

Across the top of the screen:

• Unanswered — how many are still New.
• Still open — New, Replied and Quoted together.
• Turned into bookings — of the enquiries you have marked Booked or Lost, how many booked.
• Typical reply time — the usual time between an enquiry arriving and you marking it Replied.

That last number is the most useful one on the page. Enquiries answered within a few hours book far more often than ones answered the next day, and most photographers have no idea which of those they are.

Anything still New after a day gets a warning at the top, so it does not sit there quietly.

Marketing consent

The enquiry form has a tick box: *Email me occasionally about offers and mini sessions*. It starts unticked, and consent is only recorded when it is **actually ticked** — asking a price is not agreeing to marketing.

This surprises photographers, because it means the "Enquired but never booked" marketing group is often nearly empty. That is correct, not broken. See [your clients](/clients).

Website-only accounts

An account with a Meridian website and no studio still has Enquiries, because the contact form on the website has to go somewhere. Messages from the website's contact form are listed there. The reply-time and booking figures need the studio, so they stay blank.