experienced online powerhouses share their tips on growing your business & selling photos online
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From Karen Hill
Everybody loves a sale! Some photographers choose to offer custom-timed sales for each of their individual galleries, but I prefer to have just two big sales per year for ALL of my galleries at once: I have a midsummer sale and another sale about a month before Christmas. These big sales provide a great incentive to get my clients back to the site to order more!
There are a couple of different philosophies amongst photographers about print sales, but I prefer to encourage them. Using a service like Instaproofs to handle my print sales makes accepting and fulfilling print orders a snap. Even if most of your revenue comes from your session fees and pre-paid packages, receiving print sales on the side is simple way to add an additional revenue stream to your business.
My clients' privacy is important to me, and password protecting their galleries allows me to give them control over who sees their images and who doesn’t. Occasionally people will email me for the password to their events, and I keep them really simple so they're super easy for me to remember for each event.
From Laura Murray
Instaproofs allows me to create an elevated customer experience with their beautifully designed user interface. It is a breeze to deliver galleries to my clients and the wedding vendors. All of my couples receive the full resolution digital files with their photography package. I am able to program the galleries to give my couples download access as well as the full team of wedding vendors. But when the couple passes the link along to their friends and family, they only see the option to purchase the prints. I love how I can specify how my galleries will look for each different person who logs in.
I was blown away by the volume of print orders that came in the month after I switched to Instaproofs! My print order volume tripled the first 6 months using Instaproofs and I have had a steady stream of print orders ever since. I always offer a sale for the first 2 weeks. I scheduled emails to send through Instaproofs to remind clients when their sale ends as well as when the gallery is about to expire. I always see a bump in sales when these emails go out.
Print fulfillment has never been easier! With Instaproofs, photographers have the choice of signing up for auto-fulfillment or sending their orders manually. I have chosen to manually send my orders because I like to exceed my customers' expectations by adding in some surprise complimentary prints. Instaproofs makes it easy to upload a few extra prints to the order and my entire fulfillment process start to finish takes less than 5 minutes.
From Jason Weaver
Everyone loves to get a great deal, and folks shopping for photography are no exception. Use Instaproofs' powerful marketing, visitor tracking, and bulk email tools to run specials all year round. You don't have to wait for a major holiday either. Your clients will love it, and you will watch your print orders jump every time.
One of my absolute favorite things about Instaproofs is how user friendly it is. However, people can't buy what they can't find. Make sure to create plenty of relevant categories so that your guests know where to find the photos they are looking to buy. Your photography storefront needs to be as appealing and as easy to use as possible, so take a few minutes with each event to organize and categorize your images.
Although the majority of event shooters are offering documentary style coverage, you should also be taking advantage of obvious groups and pairings that present themselves throughout the course of the day as well. See the flower girl playing with her Mom and Dad? Take a minute to get some great candids, and then take another 15 seconds to get the family together for an impromptu family portrait. Not only will the Bride and Groom appreciate you documenting their guests, but you'll end up selling more prints to the extended family as well.
From Jonathan Canlas
Never, ever put passwords on your events. I never want to limit who can and cannot purchase prints from an event - there's no point in restricting your market! Completely opening your events to the world gives every potential customer, even those you've never sold prints to in the past, the ability to view and buy your photographs without needing any information from the bride and groom. This also allows potential brides to see what a complete wedding looks like with you, which opens the door for future shoots and contracts.
Take the time to sort out and rate the best 4-6 images within each category on your events. Pre-selecting these images allows you to put your best foot forward and make the event look its absolute best. If you display the most captivating images first in each category, your viewers have a lot more incentive to dive deeper into the remainder of your gallery, and you have a much higher chance of selling photos to them. Putting your best shots in front gets your audience excited, makes you look good, and ultimately, helps you sell more prints. Win-win.
Post your events at least 3 months in advance. This allows you time to collect email addresses from the family and friends of your clients, which gives you a large base of people to start sending out invitation emails to once the photographs have been uploaded to your online photo gallery.
From Abby Grace
For large events like weddings, create a folder of Highlights that goes at the very top of your gallery! Include anywhere from 50-125 photographs, the very best of the best from the event, keeping an eye out for some of those classic, gotta-get-it-printed photographs. My Highlights gallery is also what I pull from for the initial album design and for the clients' blog post, as well as for future social media posts- it's multi-purpose for my clients AND for me as a business owner.
Offer a sale at the beginning and end of a gallery's time online. I learned from the best, Jon Canlas, and offering a percentage off has skyrocketed our print sales by giving our clients some urgency. We all know our clients WANT to have their photographs on their walls, but getting around to picking out favorites to order and frame seems to be a sticking point- a sale helps get those photos OFF the screen and into their homes where they truly belong!
While having print orders directly fulfilled and sent straight to my clients is convenient, I prefer to have prints sent to me first so I can proof and re-package them in branded print boxes. It shows an extra level of attention to detail, and helps make sure I'm not delivering any less-than-perfect prints to my clients!
From Wendy Laurel
Keep your galleries open to the public (password-free) so that friends and families can easily view their photos and place their orders. When an event is password protected it can often discourage even those that are meant to have access to the images. You might think that they could just call up the bride (or whomever) to get the password if they should have access to it, but many people do not choose to do this. So keep your galleries open, and let your visitors enjoy the images hassle-free.
Organize your images into several different categories within your galleries. When all of your images are dumped into a single, large, category, your clients and their guests will have a hard time keeping track of which images they’ve viewed and which images they want to come back to again. So before you upload your images, take the time needed to go through your images and organize them into a handful of common-sense categories.
Set up at least two sales for each of your galleries: one that runs for the first 10 days, and another that runs for the last 10 days before the gallery expires. When your visitors see that the prices for their images are scheduled to go up (or that the images are scheduled to go offline soon), they will make a purchase. To advertise these types of sales I recommend setting up automated emails to automatically let your visitors know when they’re about to happen.
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