Don't Be Lazy! How to Sell More Holiday Prints

Welcome back for another edition of “Don’t Be Lazy!”, your dose of tough love when it comes to your photography career… you may have the artistry down, but if you don’t understand the fundamentals of running a business, and you don’t work your butt off to put it all into practice, you won’t be a professional photographer for long.

It’s officially autumn, which can only mean one thing: holiday print orders are about to begin! You may have just pulled your sweaters out of storage and started ordering pumpkin spice lattes, but your workflow should be heading into full-on winter mode. This is your chance to give a nice bump to your revenue—if you formulate a strategy ahead of time and are diligent in executing it.

“But, Richard,” you say. “My clients don’t want to buy prints. They just want their digital files.”

Those excuses won’t work here, buddy.

It’s your job as a photographer to educate your clients on the value of print, and it’s your job as a business to sell products/services and make a profit. If you aren’t selling prints, you are missing a chance to make additional revenue from a client you’ve already obtained. And any good business owner knows that it is easier and less expensive to keep an existing client than to get a new one. Why would you miss out on an opportunity like this?

DON’T BE LAZY! With a little bit of planning and preparation, you can turn winter into a profitable season. Richard has five pointers to help you pull it off…

PREACH THE IMPORTANCE OF PRINTS

There are tons of reasons for your clients to buy prints from you and not just digital files—like the risks of expiring technologies, the personalized sentimentality of a printed photo gift, and the convenience & superior quality of prints that you, as the photographer, can provide. So, make sure they get the message! Use every opportunity, from phone calls to emails to handwritten notes, to communicate the value of prints to your clients.

Psst… It’s best to start these conversations before a shoot even takes place, but if you didn’t, don’t be discouraged—the holiday season is another relevant time to gush over all the wonderful things about printing your photos!

KNOW YOUR COSTS

If you’re going to make money, you better know your raw costs. If you’ve been keeping up with our “Don’t Be Lazy!” blog series, you already know the importance of tracking all your expenses for everything that keeps your business running. When it comes to holiday print orders, you’ll want to keep an eye specifically on your raw costs for individual print products, the order minimum price from your lab, and the cost of shipping (whether you’re drop shipping using your lab’s packaging options or having the lab ship to your studio so you can mail the prints yourself).

Oh yeah, don’t forget to weigh in the value of your time, too! Calculate how many hours you’ll spend marketing to clients and prepping/placing their orders, and assign a clear hourly dollar value to that time. This will not only help you build that time spent into your pricing, but will also help you balance how much time you are spending on promoting holiday print sales with how much you expect to see in return.

PRICE YOUR PRINTS STRATEGICALLY

Now is the time to mark up your prices… like, RIGHT NOW! Why? You see, the psychological strategies behind sales & discounts are absolutely fascinating (there’s tons of great reads available on the science of sales, so get out there and do some research). The idea here is to bank on principles of value and urgency to get your clients buying.

If you increase your prices now, you can offer significant discounts during the holiday season that make your customers 1) feel like they are getting an item that is of much higher value than they are paying for it, and 2) feel a sense of urgency to purchase before the discount is no longer available. But increasing your prices now is key to still making a worthwhile profit on these sales.

REACH OUT EARLY AND OFTEN

Part of making sure you’re prepared to deliver prints is making sure your clients know it’s time to order them. Start reaching out now so your clients know that there are plenty of opportunities coming up that are perfect for prints, from holiday cards for everyone on their list to photo gifts for loved ones to a New Years’ spruce up of their walls with frames or canvas wraps.

You can also boost your efforts by turning every day into an occasion for prints! Early-bird sales, abandoned-cart sales, last-minute sales, start-of-winter sales, end-of-year sales, one-for-you-one-for-a-friend sales, the possibilities are endless…

If you’re using a gallery & storefront hosting site (like Instaproofs, Shootproof, or Pic-Time, then you already have tons of great marketing tools at your disposal to automate communication not only with your clients but everyone who has viewed a gallery. That last part is pretty important, so take note—think of how many more prints you can sell when you have extended family buying prints from a kid's portrait session or the entirety of the guest list buying prints from a wedding!

Bonus: Make sure your gallery is organized to facilitate sales—detail shots from a wedding are great for publications, but no one will be buying a fine art print of the bouquet. Highlight portraits and candid moments featuring people.

KNOW THE DEADLINES

Don’t let the clock run out on print orders! First, make sure you know your lab’s turnaround times on prints. Remember, turnarounds don’t include shipping time, so you’ll need to factor that in, too.

Then, figure out your deadlines so you can communicate them outwardly. You’ll need to consider how long it takes you to prep files for print, your lab’s turnaround times, the volume of print orders you’ll probably be placing (to gauge your workload), and how much extra “wiggle room” you need to give yourself (since surely you won’t be spending the next three months in front of your computer waiting to submit the next order that comes in).

Bonus: the earlier you can get a client’s order, the more profit you can make! That’s because you can wait to fulfill orders for certain print products until your lab puts them on sale, lowering your raw costs. Lay out some early-bird deadlines with incentives, like a free 8x10 print or discount on a future portrait session, to help get orders back to you promptly!

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