It’s a well-known fact that before digital photography, almost every event photographer includes a custom photo album with their offerings. This started to change with digital for 2 main reasons:
1. Photographers that used to shoot 400-600 images (this isn’t a typo!), began shooting 1,000 – 2,500 and this made it really difficult for brides to choose their favorites.
2. Designing photo album was time-consuming, and the process of communicating and completing revisions was a big hassle.
Additionally, the advancement in the capabilities of digital cameras has lowered the “barrier for entry” for “pro” photographers which encouraged an army of part-timers. These part-timers (who generally had full-time jobs), didn’t have the time or interest to sell albums.
Over the years, we’ve witnessed the threat to the wedding albums and have fought back by addressing the 2 problems. Here’s how:
1. We launched a Free Selection Service which takes the stress out of choosing album photos. Once a photographer sends us ALL of the edited images, our designers will organize the photos into 2 galleries:
Gallery 1: Features the photos that we recommend. If the contract calls for 80 photos, we’ll choose the best 80. Typically the bride ends up using 85-90% of the photos we select, and she can easily remove photos that she doesn’t like.
Gallery 2: Features ALL of the photos – here, the bride can add any photos that we didn’t select, and within 1 hour, they’ve been able to complete what was a very difficult task. Problem solved.
2. Our “Design service” also includes the ability for 3-way communication between the bride, the photographer and Zookbinders. Revision requests are easily communicated on a comments field on every spread, which eliminates separate email correspondence.
We get high praise from photographers that use our Selection and Album Design Services as it takes away so much “non-value added” work. Now you know the secret to selling photo albums: make things easy for clients and they’ll order. Need more tips on how to sell photo albums (and make oodles of cash??) … give us a call.
