Your best sales tool is a beautiful wedding album in the hands of a happy customer… 2 months after the event.  Yes, two months!  If you deliver an album in 2 months, you’ll have the happiest customers on the planet!  

The average album leaving our factory has a date on the cover that is 9 months ago!  This means that the customer is selecting their photos 6 months after the event, when their interest and motivation has dropped considerably.

When brides are making the selections within a few weeks, photographers share the following benefits: ecstatic customers, larger orders, more upgrades, and of course higher profits!  They also noticed a HUGE increase in referrals.  So before you think of all the reasons why this can’t work, here’s the secret:  pre-select the photos you recommend should be in the album.  Simply create a grouping of 100 photos and call them: “photographers favorites” or “photographer’s choice”.   Rather than presenting 1000+ images with no guidance, this gives your clients a ‘head start’ in choosing the photos they want for their album.

You are better equipped than your bride both technically and artistically to choose the images best suited for an attractive album. Why not get the ball rolling and make the selections for her? You can breeze through hundreds of images in pro software, make quick side-by-side comparisons, and flag the images you know will best tell the story. If you were behind the lens on the wedding day, then you know who the key players are, and the most memorable parts of the day. Even if your selections are not 100% right, it will be much easier for the bride to simply tweak your selections than start from scratch.

Consider this process an up-sell opportunity as well. Let’s say you’ve pre-sold your couple on an album with 85 images. Present them with 85 plus 20 or 30 more you think really add to the narrative, and be ready to tell them that it will only cost $__ to keep the added images in their album. If they bite, you’ve just increased your sale!

We talk to many photographers who are frustrated by waiting for their clients to choose the photos.  Many still take a “wait and see” approach and even warn brides that they have a limited time to order their album before prices go up. Often these approaches only exacerbate an already stressful and overwhelming task for brides. She might struggle for hours to open each of her 1,300 images in some picture viewer program trying to figure out if jpg 672 is better than jpg 673 on her (uncalibrated) computer monitor. It’s time consuming, frustrating and just might lead to her procrastinating.  …Which is why you want to make it easy for your customers to order.

If you’re not already using our album design service, then here’s a way to further improve your workflow and your bottom line: Once you and your bride have agreed on the final images for her album, you’ll do any necessary retouching and then just upload them to us for design. We’ll turn around a stunning, modern album design in a matter of days that your customer is sure to love.

Once she has approved her design, you’ll have even more up-sell opportunities.  Our customized shopping cart feature that was designed to tempt your customers with album upgrades, clone copies for parents, even ready-to-hang framed pieces featuring their favorite page spread. Click the “Need help with album design?”  link from www.Zookbinders.com or visit www.zookiepro.com for more details.

So don’t let extra income from album sales slip right through your fingers. I challenge you to make it your company’s stated goal to not only deliver beautiful wedding images, but to put a finished wedding album in the hands of your customer within two months of their wedding. A happy customer with one of your albums is the best sales rep a photographer can have! She’ll show off her album to all her friends who’ll be paying MUCH closer attention if she just got married a few weeks ago rather than several months ago.