We’re happy to have guest blogger and award-winning photographer Bryan Caporicci on our blog again. He delves into the importance of offering albums to clients, how to sell them, how to price them and much more.
As a professional wedding photographer, you love to have your clients’ images printed, presented and preserved in a beautiful wedding album. You know that the album is the one keepsake that will stand the test of time and allow your couples to re-live their wedding day for years to come.
Are all of your brides and grooms getting wedding albums, though? Did you know that only about 20 percent of photographers will deliver a wedding album to the majority of their couples this year?
With all of the consumer printing options available to our clients today combined with the seemingly never-ending downward pressure on price, many wedding photographers struggle with getting their clients on board with an album.
I believe that with the right process, language and approach, you, too, can be successfully selling albums to all of your clients. You can be in the 20 percent of photographers, and in doing so, you can enjoy the following benefits in your business:
• Have a better representation of your work in the public.
• Deliver a better product.
• Book more brides.
• Command higher prices.
• Work with the brides who hire you to do exactly what you love to do.
I can show you how to successfully sell albums in your photography business.
Fundamentals to Selling Albums
There are 4 fundamentals to selling albums that you must follow:
• Give brides something that they can’t get themselves.
• Make it easy to buy from you.
• Believe in albums yourself!
I discuss these fundamentals in more depth in a recent article I wrote on SproutingPhotographer.com titled “How to sell a wedding album to every bride” and I’d love for you to read it. In this article, I discuss a proven process that will allow you to integrate albums into your customer experience that will not only allow you to sell more albums, but in a way that will make clients want to buy an album.
Sample Albums
One of the greatest sales tools that you can use to effectively sell albums to your brides are your sample albums. But when you don’t display, design and discuss them appropriately, they could turn into the biggest deterrent to selling wedding albums.
Here are four quick tips for successfully using sample albums as a sales tool in your photography business:
• Have only one album per wedding – do not do a “best of” album or combine multiple weddings per album.
• Keep many sample albums in your studio, and only show each bride and groom one album that is directly relevant to them.
• Display sample albums in your studio in a prominent location. Make it known that you are a wedding photographer who creates beautiful albums.
• Give your albums greater depth and meaning by attaching stories and narratives to certain images. When presenting your sample album with a couple, walk them through the images with stories.
I wrote about this topic in more depth on SproutingPhotographer.com in this article titled “6 principles to turn sample wedding albums into a sales tool” and would love for you to check it out.
Pricing Your Albums
The “how-to” mechanics of pricing your albums is a great (and sometimes lengthy) discussion. Let me summarize by saying that you must factor in all of your costs – both hard costs (i.e., the album from your lab) and the soft costs (i.e., the time you spend to design and retouch the album). I go into this topic in this article titled “How to price your wedding albums as a photographer” over on the Sprouting Photographer website.
The Business of Wedding Albums FREE Article Series
You can be in the 20 percent of photographers who successfully sell albums to the majority of their clients, and in doing so you can make more money and offer a better product all the while. You just have to know how. I’ve created a FREE “Business of Albums” series on the SproutingPhotographer.com blog that will show you the exact how-to steps for selling and pricing wedding albums.
Here are the links to the three currently published articles on the topic:
Part #1 of the “Business of Wedding Albums” series – How to sell a wedding album to every bride
Part #2 of the “Business of Wedding Albums” series – 6 Principles to turn sample albums into a sales tool
Part #3 of the “Business of Wedding Albums” series – How to price your wedding albums as a photographer
Part #4 of the “Business of Wedding Albums” series – Wedding album pricing strategies for photographers
In the meantime, happy shooting!
