If, as a wedding photographer, you consider yourself a storyteller and you sell yourself as such to your prospective clients, than offering professional wedding albums in your collections is a must. Turning over nothing more a thumb drive full of images as your prime deliverable does not make you a storyteller any more than delivering a truckload of 2×4’s to a home site makes you a carpenter. While making this case can be a challenge when brides are so focused on getting those digital files, it’s made more difficult if you don’t show sample wedding albums at your consultations. Simply describing wedding albums in your brochure or showing pictures of them on your website is not going to cut it. A professional wedding album is one of those things that your clients will need to hold in their hands to truly appreciate it’s value. Just like fine clothing, jewelry or automobiles that command a premium price, buyers who fall in love with them will find a way to afford it. Nobody ever bought a $50,000 automobile without first sitting in it, taking it out for a test drive or listening to how the stereo sounds. Oh and then there’s that new car smell! Do you think a dealership would ever rely only on pictures of that car or swatches of the different colors of leather the seats come in? Not if they ever expect to sell any they don’t. In much the same way, you cannot expect your clients to invest in a wedding album if you won’t invest in a sample. Here’s a few things to consider when creating studio samples to promote your business.

• Show what you want to sell. If your package includes an 80 image Lustre Book with a leather cover and a simple design, then show that book. If you can’t point to a hand-crafted wedding album and say “this is what you get with my Sapphire package,” your clients will tend to fill in any gaps in information in their own heads, which may cause trouble down the road.
• Show your best work from a single event rather than a “best of” collection. While it’s tempting to show 100 of the hottest pictures you’ve ever taken, remember that the real attraction and indeed the primary purpose of a wedding album is to document a single event. Save the “best of” collection for a slideshow presentation.
• Show a Lexus too! Even if your clients most always buy a Camry or more affordable wedding album, show something a bit more extravagant as well. Not only will a luxury option give you more credibility, but psychologically it makes it easier for your client to justify the Camry purchase if they can say to themselves that they didn’t go “overboard” on their photography purchase. The added investment in the extravagant sample album will more than pay off with higher sales of your other wedding albums.
• Keep samples fresh. This means replacing your samples every couple years. Your samples will take ten times more abuse over a couple years than would ever befall a client’s wedding album. They may begin to look beat up, which is not a good reflection on you. Likewise, samples showing dress and floral styles from five years ago is not going to help you look current. Make it a point to keep samples fresh and on point.

Don’t forget parent albums! Get a 6×6 or 8×8 copy of your sample album in order to promote parent album sales. There’s no sale that requires less work than parent album copies of your bride and grooms album. So price them appropriately and have them ready to show. Zookbinders offers studio sample albums at 50% off at all times. There’s no better time to up your game and increase your value with fresh studio samples.