Recently, I teamed up with Ted Linczak to discuss a simple source of revenue that many wedding photographers fail to utilize well: wedding albums. Ted adds tens of thousands of dollars to his business every year with a few simple workflow and sales techniques. In this video, he shares some of his tips.
Ted and his wife run their wedding photography business Nuvo Images out of Charleston, SC. Their workflow and business model lean heavily on incorporating high-quality wedding albums into their sales packages and shooting style. We decided to team up with Saal Digital and Ted to explore the ways he has made his business so successful with albums.
Making the Sale
Albums have the potential to add thousands of dollars to every wedding you book, but in order to get that revenue, you have to sell the client on them. It's important to educate your client on the album's value from your very first meeting, which should happen in a face-to-face setting rather than over the phone. The client needs to be able to see and touch the products you're offering them, which will help establish a base expectation of what they'll receive. This means you need to put your best foot forward and have beautiful, well designed, high quality albums to show them. If the client is not in your area, consider setting up a video chat and having high quality pictures and videos of your albums to share with them.
Shooting for and Designing the Album
If you're going to sell your clients albums, you need to shoot the wedding in such a way that it will accommodate your album design process. Make sure to shoot in image pairs so you always have a variety of options when designing the album. Make sure your lighting, exposure, and image colors stay consistent for image sets so they'll flow and match on a single album spread. Shoot both landscape and vertical orientations so you'll have options to assemble the best images into a design. Shoot a wide variety, but stay consistent.
Keep your album spread designs simple, clean, and timeless. Don't overclutter a spread with too many images. In the same way you shot the wedding with consistent lighting and settings, make sure to assemble album spreads so that the images flow and stay consistent. Move through your images chronologically and use each spread to tell the story of the different parts of the wedding day.
Upselling
After the wedding is over, there's a big emotional pool your clients have that can be utilized to sell them additional spreads. It's important not to diminish this emotional pool by letting your clients have access to the images before you've had an album meeting. Instead, it's better to meet with your clients soon after the wedding with a full album design and include more spreads than they ordered. Communicate everything clearly with them so as not to be underhanded, but let them know this is an opportunity to add value to their album. Offer a discount if they add spreads that day to increase the incentive to spend more.
Wedding albums offer your clients a timeless memory that can be passed down through the family, and they are an excellent way for you to make your wedding photography business more profitable. Try out some of Ted's tips in your own business or share some of your own in the comments below.
If you'd like to save $60 off your next wedding album, Saal Digital is offering Fstoppers readers a voucher off your next order. Depending on where you're located, visit their US site or their European site to claim the deal.
This was so awesome to watch great job guys <3