How many of you offer disk only packages? In the last few years many of us in the industry have felt pressure from brides to start offering these packages. We know that despite what a bride says, she’ll most likely never get an album made and will just take her disk to Wal-Mart to make prints.

How do we combat this? Johnny Baijan of Bensenville, Illinois has a great idea. He too has felt the pressure to offer disk only packages in recent years but he didn’t want to give up entirely on selling albums. Recently, he developed a new way to show the value of having an album. He started by designing a spread or two, framing them and presenting them to the bride when she comes in to pick up her disk.

Johnny says brides have been blown away by this and will either buy one of the framed layouts, decide to go ahead and buy an album or both. Often when a bride sees a framed panoramic spread with fully retouched images, she realizes the value her photographer can give her by creating an album and enhancing her images.

Even if your client lives out of town you can create a couple of page spreads in a slide show or as low resolution files and email them to your client showing them how beautiful an album could be.  None of this is rocket science, just sound salesmanship – you can’t sell what you don’t show. What better way is there to sell the concept of an album than by showing a glimpse of what they could receive?

If you’re considering giving this idea a try, Zookbinders can help. We offer premade frames already sized to various panoramic proportions. We can even make you a small Soft Cover Press Book as a proof book if you’d prefer to create an entire album to show and sell to your bride.

Thanks Johnny for your suggestion. If any of you have sales or marketing tips, please send them to spatrick@zookbinders.com.