Believe it or not, there are still some things in the photo marketplace that are trending upwards, and one of them is sign-in books for weddings. Think about this from a marketing standpoint: You offer your wedding clients a chance to do an engagement session bundled with a sign-in book a few weeks prior to their wedding. Your customer is blown away by your creative genius and they can’t wait to put their images on display for their guests and replace the tired old guest book with the pen that looks like a feather. Once displayed at the wedding reception, their guests will marvel at your stunning photography. When the evening is over, the value of the book now filled with handwritten sentiments just shot north of priceless in the eyes of the newlyweds. You’ll sleep better because you’ve just showcased your work to the scores of people who attended the reception—some of whom may be getting married soon, know of someone who is, or just may need a good family portrait!
So how do you get your wedding clients to commit to purchasing a sign-in book from you? Just tell them about all the upside:
You can schedule your engagement session whenever and wherever you want! Point out to your customer that unlike wedding day photo sessions, their engagement session need not be geographically convenient to ceremony or reception locations. Maybe they’d like to do a session in the city because their wedding day events will be out in the suburbs. Perhaps they’d like to go to the place where they met or had their first date. Or, maybe they’ll want to schedule a session out in the snow or fall leaves because their wedding will take place in July. So what if it rains on the scheduled engagement session? Unlike the wedding day, you can simply reschedule the engagement session!
Engagement sessions are often less stressful than wedding day sessions. There is no worry of being late to the reception or incurring overtime charges from the limo company. You’ll have more freedom to pose the couple lying in the grass, or sitting on a fence without risking damage to her wedding gown. Consider allowing your couple an outfit change for different looks during the engagement session. The bride-to-be will appreciate the fact that she can rock a pair of boots or bright colored top for the session, or put her man in those jeans that she just loves on him.
An engagement session gives both the photographer and the couple a chance to “test drive” the experience and set expectation levels on both sides of the camera before it’s too late. Couples can get a feel for you and how you direct them and what the end result will look like in the images. As the photographer, you can make your customer more comfortable by taking the extra time to explain your own creative processes, lens changes, test exposures, etc. so that on the wedding day, they will be more likely to trust you, your choice of backgrounds and lighting and, no, that trash can over there is not in the shot!
You can also point out that any of their favorite engagement session images can be used as something of an introduction to their bridal album. You might even pave the way for an additional “trash-the-dress” session (with or without the actual “trashing” part) to create a whole seasons of love story!
Take a look at the sign-in book sample album below created by Zookbinders customer Shawna Shields of Narrow Road Productions in Soldotna, Alaska. Shawna books her wedding customers in an inclusive package that includes wedding day coverage, bridal album and an engagement session. She is able to then offer the sign-in book from the engagement session at a very attractive price and she says that fully half of her customers will make the additional purchase. Shawna reports that while she and the bridal party are busy taking photos on the wedding day, the sign-in book is doing its job generating a lot of buzz during the reception cocktail hour, and she passes out abut ten times more business cards as a result!
Zookbinders offers products perfectly suited for sign-in books starting at just $87 for an 8×8 PhotoBook with up to 20 sides. Make a bigger splash with a PhotoBook Plus or LustreBook starting at just $142 or $180 respectively for 10×10, 12×9 or 12×8 sizes. When uploading your order in ROES, select the sign-in book option under “event type” in the review order screen, and your book will ship with two permanent, quick dry markers perfectly suited to write on either of the available glossy or matte paper surfaces we offer (we still like matte paper for this application as this will minimize fingerprints).
So this wedding season, consider showcasing your work with a sign-in book for your bridal couples. Remind your customers that you are selling memories and that their engagement sign-in book and their bridal album will be family heirlooms from the day they bring them home.
Oh, and don’t forget to bring plenty of business cards to your next wedding! Click here to see more work from Narrow Road Productions or visit them on Facebook.
Since we released the matte paper option for press printed PhotoBook and PhotoBook Plus products, many of our customers have given it a try. While many customers sing it’s praises recognizing, as we do, the richness of the pebble texture and the ethereal, almost water-color reproduction of color and contrast, other customers have questioned the print quality or have been unhappy with the tonal range of the paper.
We recognize these opinions and, given that it is not in our best interest to deliver a product that a customer is unhappy with, it is perhaps wise to review the different paper surfaces and print methods.
We run two different print processes here at Zookbinders. Our premium album products, including the Zook Book, Matted Albums and LustreBook are true photographic albums printed on photographic paper, sometimes called silver halide paper. Photographic printing means that the prints are made by exposing chemically sensitized paper to light. The photographic printing process has existed in one form or another since the dawn of photography, and it remains the gold standard for image reproduction with the richest and truest colors and widest tonal range.
Other products we offer including PhotoBook Plus, PhotoBook and Soft Cover Press books are all press printed products. They are printed on high-speed digital presses that apply four color inks to a variety of paper surfaces and thicknesses including the matte paper surface available in PhotoBook Plus and PhotoBook. The efficiency of the digital press together with the lower cost of paper materials are largely responsible for allowing us to offer books at a much lower price point than photographic albums. This cost savings has resonated with our customers and these products have found their place in the market as add-on “parent” albums for weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs, as well as the high school senior and portrait markets.
Although the HP Indigo presses we use are state-of-the-art, press printed material has its limitations and cannot always compare to photographs. This is the trade-off for speed and lower cost. The full spectrum of colors that can be achieved in the RGB world of photographic printing are simply not possible in the CMYK press world. You can see this for yourself in Photoshop by opening an image with bright, saturated blues or greens and clicking image > mode > CMYK Color. The diagram below also shows the spectrum of light that is available to both RGB and CMYK color printers.
Getting back to matte papers they, as a whole, also tend to be less contrasty than glossy or satin finishes. Matte paper’s ability to show tonal range in the darkest areas of an image is limited. This is in part what gives the “water color” look to the finished product.
If accurate, saturated reproduction of color at the edges of the color gamut is most important to you, or your clients, selecting from our photographically printed product line of Zook Book, Matted or LustreBook is your best bet. On the other hand, if you or your customer is more price sensitive, or you desire the matte or glossy paper surfaces, then the press printed PhotoBook Plus and PhotoBook product lines may be just the ticket.
Since we at Zookbinders moved from just assembling photo albums to actually printing the albums too since we launched print-to-bind service in 2006, we’ve learned a thing or two about digital imaging.
We commonly see image files uploaded to us at every conceivable combination of file size and resolution, some which are needlessly large. We recommend that photographers prepare their image files to the accepted industry standard for photographic printing, which is 300 dpi in the sRGB color space and saved at a level 10 JPEG format.
JPEG compression is the clever method of reducing the image size (and therefore storage capacity needed for) digital photographic files devised by the Joint Photographic Experts Group from where it gets its name. Compression means loss of image quality. Without getting too technical here, converting your image files to JPEG is a tradeoff between maintaining image quality and minimizing storage size. The degree of compression can be adjusted. In Photoshop, the range is from 1 to 12 with 1 being the highest degree of compression coupled with the lowest image quality, and 12 being the least compression and highest quality image.
So given that 12 is the highest quality JPEG, why would we recommend a level 10? The answer is that an image saved at level 10 JPEG is roughly one third the size of the level 12 file which will reduce your storage needs and dramatically speed your internet upload time.* Oh, and by the way, no one can tell the difference! That’s right, there is no noticeable increase in JPEG artifacts going from level 12 to level 10. You don’t have to take our word for it either. The popular internet hosting site SmugMug reports that after years of debate and contests in forums, the results are that no one has been able to tell the difference between printed photographs generated from files stored at Photoshop JPEG 12 and JPEG 10 settings.
The takeaway here is save yourself the frustration and time wasted watching your images upload to your internet hosting site, or to Zookbinders. You won’t be compromising quality, and just maybe you can get off the computer and have dinner with your family.
*For example, given a 12” x 24” album spread at 300dpi, the uncompressed file (either PSD or TIFF, flattened) will be just over 74 mb. Save this file as a level 12 JPEG file, and it drops to around 15mb. If you save it to a level 10 JPEG, it drops to around 5mb or roughly one third the size of the level 12 file without any noticeable loss in image quality.
…and were thrilled with the event! The following day, we sent out a simple 5 question survey to our Open House attendees to gain some feedback. We were happy to hear that they learned a lot from our “what brides want” presentation and are really excited to use that info to help grow their business! Within the survey, we allowed our guests to ask any further questions, so we figured we’d share the knowledge with everyone!
Here are some of the questions they asked with our responses:
Q:Will you offer the same kind of interactive ordering like zookie pro for designs we do ourselves? If we can design and upload our album for the bride to see (and also allow her to order mutiple) or order more copies later….that would be awesome. A: Yes! We will be building a new ordering system this year that will have many of the great features of zookie pro (like our “shopping cart”), so you’ll be able to improve the ordering experience between you and your client whether you let us design your albums in zookie pro, or choose to design your own albums and order through Zookbinders. Our goal is to help make the ordering process super simple for you and your clients. You can expect this feature sometime in the late Fall.
Q: When will the Zook Book be ready for in house design? A: The Zook Book (which will have a different name with zookie pro- something along the lines of “Premium Big”) will be available by the end of May.
Q: Can you recommend a good blog, for professional photographers, moving into the wedding field? A: On the right side of our blog, you’ll see our “Blog Roll” which is a list of our favorite blogs. Specifically for weddings, DWF is a great tool (http://www.digitalweddingforum.com/).
Q: Are you also a regular print lab? A: No, we only offer our print-to-bind services for our albums/photobooks.
Not only did our attendees ask a ton of great questions, they also gave us some wonderful praise:
“You ran and conducted a VERY NICE program. THANK YOU & ALL AT ZOOKBINDERS.”
“Thanks Mark for an informative evening. Your products are wonderful.”
“I will most certainly work with Zookbinders, making beautiful books for my couples, moving forward.”
Thank you, again, for all who attended and gave us such great feedback!
Since 1995, our founders Mark and Leslie Zucker have applied their rigorous personal standards for excellence to everything Zookbinders. The professional photographers we have been so fortunate to work with (and their satisfied clients) benefit from our cutting-edge products, time-saving services and above all, customer care. We'll do whatever it takes to preserve precious memories and help you tell personal stories well.
Spend less time in front of the computer and make more money doing what you do best. ZOHO Design has been creating award-winning album designs since 2002. In fact, they were the first to offer one-of-a-kind album design, and are the exclusive Zookbinders album design partner. With ZOHO Design layouts and hand crafted albums from Zookbinders you have the winning team on your side. Together we can help you work smarter – not harder – and truly stand out from the crowd.
it's here: photobook plus™
Bigger Books at Less-than-Premium-Prices! The contemporary book of choice features lay-flat pages in larger sizes: up to 12x12 square, 9x12 vertical and 12x9 horizontal. more >
new framed album panoramas
Increase your sales and delight your clients with new Framed Album Panoramas—the perfect complement to any album or PhotoBook. Available in a variety of square and rectangular sizes as well as three finishes. more >
