A DAY IN THE LIFE: NETTL OF EXETER 

Tom Dobson, Studio Manager, Nettl of Exeter

Hi there! Tom here. I’m going to be taking you through a typical day at the Nettl of Exeter studio. We’re a full service agency specialising in print, signage, website design, SEO, branding and social media. If you’re ever in the area and fancy popping-in, we’ve got you covered with free wifi, great coffee and work spaces for meetings and hot-desking. 

(Estimated reading time: 5 mins)

Morning

9am

The Nettl System runs every aspect of our studio, from billing and invoicing to creating websites and ordering print. First thing we always do here at Nettl of Exeter though is to run a Studio Summary. It’s a fancy name for a project list and it shows every project we have on and where each one is up to. This helps us to plan our time and delegate tasks to various team members. The summary is generated automatically from our CRM, which is the Nettl System. 

9.30am

We have in-house manufacturing equipment for print and signage jobs. We also do vehicle wraps so the Nettl System tells us whereabouts in the Production lifecycle these projects are. The studio team goes through the jobs with our Production manager using the Production Dashboard to understand how much is in the production workflow and when artwork might be required for upcoming signage projects yet to enter the production workflow. This gives us a great overview of how much production has on and which team members have certain jobs to produce for the day.

10am

Print is a core part of our business and we get sent a lot of files – some better than others! Thankfully, we have pre-flight software included within the Nettl back-office. So the team and I will set-up jobs for any orders that have come in overnight, and get the system to pre-flight the files for us. The Nettl System has the files pre-flighted and ready for proofing or printing in a few minutes – it saves us hours in manual file checks.

 10.15am

Pre-flight whirs away in the background whilst we make some care calls. We’ll run a ‘Lost & Dormant’ report from the Nettl back-office which tells us which customers have been inactive recently. I’ll make calls and look to rekindle connections with clients, adding internal notes in the system as I go.

11am

Most of our print jobs are delivered directly to customers so we like to contact them to get their feedback, especially on the weird and wonderful bespoke orders. I’ll run a report which shows jobs delivered the previous week and get back on the phone to follow up, see how their event went and to find out what future work the customer might need us to help with.

Afternoon

12pm

Time for a client meeting – customers can arrange call-backs online via Nettl.com so one of the team is always on a Zoom somewhere or in a face to face meeting in one of our workspaces. I’m leading this one so will get out some samples to show the client as they’re in to discuss their festive campaign. 

1pm

Quick check of my emails post meeting and we’ve had several online orders. Our customers can self-serve and place orders from within an individual client dashboard and we’ve had a few come in since I last checked. More and more customers are ordering after studio hours, which is fine as the Nettl System automatically grabs the jobs and pre-flights the files, and takes payment, but we still get a lot in between 9-5pm. I’ll give these a once over and set any jobs to ‘Online Proof’ where I think the customer needs to have a final check before print. 

2pm

The client who I met with earlier needs a pop-up website as part of their festive campaign. As the site won’t be up forever we’re going to use a web editor called Brambl – it’s perfect for quick builds. I just need to send the client a proposal which I’ll do via the Nettl System as the client can approve it online, via their dashboard.

2.15pm

Talking all things festive with our client earlier reminded me to send an e-shot out about Christmas marketing – we find a lot of customers leave things until too late to make a good ROI so I want to send something out to remind them. I’ll take some time to browse the Nettl Marketing Archive – there are loads of cool campaigns in there, ready to go. Think I’m going to go with a Christmas marketing themed e-shot and also a ‘reorder e-shot’, to prompt customers to reorder jobs that they’ve previously bought from us. We’ve used this campaign before and it’s successful – all we do is plumb in the product we want clients to reorder and the Nettl back-office does the rest from collating the clients to sending the e-shot, and personalising it, and providing the analytics. 

 3pm

We’ve had a call for a pretty bespoke print job so I head to Personal Shopper in the Nettl System to ask for advice. From there I can ask for guidance, advice or request a bespoke quote. Whilst I’m in the Nettl System I see a new promotional merchandise  range has been launched so I check that out and brief the team. Nettl HQ has provided some marketing assets based around the new range so I promote these on our social media channels.

4pm

I get a notification that the website proposal from earlier has been accepted by the client online. I create a new project within the Nettl System and send the client a link to pay the deposit online.  Within 5 minutes, the client has paid so I create the first couple of tasks against the project and delegate those to various team members. The client doesn’t have any images to use for the site so I send them a new link to browse our stock photography library. The link takes them back to their customer dashboard and allows them to ‘favourite’ images they like which then notifies our team. Pretty intuitive and we find it saves us time in project creep as the client has a level of creative control. 

4.30pm

I need to send some clients a link to our Instant Web Quote tool. We find that it’s a good starting point and conversation starter if nothing else, but most quotes convert. Nettl HQ came up with the tool a few months ago and we haven’t looked back.

4.45pm

I always like to run an updated Studio Summary report before the end of the day to make sure that all online print orders have been sent off and certain projects have been completed during working hours. The report also lets me see how the team are progressing with jobs so I can forecast and delegate appropriately. 

And before you know it, it’s 5.30pm and we’re winding down for the evening. 

I hope you enjoyed an insight to a typical day here at Nettl of Exeter.

Tom

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