Pro Photo Business Forum

Welcome! In this article we will examine album image selection as a value added service. I’ll preface our conversation by noting that there are many ways to approach image selection, such as letting clients select their album images, and there is no right or wrong way. It is about what works best for you, your business and your clients. The views expressed here are generated from my many conversations with photographers over the years.

Furthering the thinking from my last article, which can be found by clicking here, leads me to an organic conclusion that image selection is a value added service you provide for your clients. It will add more value and prestige to your business that ends with a high level of customer satisfaction, which in turn leads to an increased bottom line. To achieve that end result, keep the album as a treasured item for your client and a mobile marketing piece for you, the selected images must be a limited amount of THE BEST OF THE BEST.

Your clients picked you for their photography needs! They truly paid for your art, products and services. Consider these questions; does the typical bride know how to pick out a limited number of your best pictures to produce the most amazing album possible? Is the groom going to be able to help her? Are they going to consider how the images will look on the page? Will they be overwhelmed trying to decide between the pictures you show them? Will they want so many images that you will have to make a collage page? Will a collage page highlight your photographic art? Will a page like that actually be dramatic enough to capture their moment? Is she going to want to slide in pictures from a friend’s point and shoot? How much time will you spend retouching all these images for them?

With a limited amount of your best pictures you are making your album designing experience better. This is because you will not have to retouch “x” number of images, and you will also be able to deliver a higher quality album for them in a quick turnaround time. For instance, when a couple returns from their honeymoon are they ready to take care of their post-wedding photographic needs immediately? Or do they need to write a whole lot of thank you cards? How long will it take them to pick their images? How much time will you allow them to decide on their images? By letting them pick their images you are actually allowing the perceived value of your work to diminish day-by-day. The importance of the album goes down along with opportunities for print sales. Therefore, by providing image selection as a service, you will have the album designed by the time they return from their honeymoon and delivered before they finish their thank you cards.

As a professional photographer you provide the best possible customer experience backed with great services and products in order to ensure repeat business. If they pick their images, how stressful will all this be for you as the photographer and for your client? Is your client going to abide by your rules and regulations to must have and additional images? Forget about all this nonsense affecting your business’s growth. Make the overall album experience easier on you and your client by selecting the images as a value added service. The key to true profitability is efficiency, higher quality products and services, decreased waste, well managed operations, increased perceived value and increased client satisfaction levels.

By providing album image selection as a service, you heighten your service value and prestige, lead to true profitability, take the stress out of image selection, gain back your marketing piece, wow clients and their friends and you will have a great time while doing so, especially since you did not have to retouch 200 images for the album! Next time we will be talking about the relationship between image selection and album design.

Jay Michael Stevens
Forbeyon's Customer Care Manager
Forbeyon is the photographer's sole album destination
Find us at:
website: www.forbeyon.com
twitter: http://twitter.com/Forbeyon
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Forbeyon-Inc/92723162750

You must be able to calculate the efficiency of your advertising efforts. When wedding photographers say their advertising is working, they generally just know that they are receiving calls and booking weddings. You must know more than this.

You must know if your marketing is efficient or not. The best way to give yourself the answer to this question is through the use of statistics. As a business owner that wants to succeed, you have a responsibility to track the statistics of your business. Through marketing you begin to attract individuals to your business. These individuals are inquiries, and you must ask each inquiry one basic question in order to create the statistics you need:

How did you hear about us?

Keep track of the following after your initial contact with your inquiry:

1. How many of your inquiries did you convert into consultations?
2. How many of these consultations did you convert into paying customers?
3. How many of your paying customers have you converted into repeat customers?

The answers to these questions will show you where you are the least efficient. If you see that you are only converting 10% of the inquiries you receive into consultations and 90% of the consultations you have are converted into paying customers, you know you must change the language used when answering your phone or replying to people inquiring about your services via email.

Tracking each and every inquiry will also tell you where your paid advertising is failing or succeeding. You do not need to focus on the ads that are doing the best until you have addressed the ones that are doing the worst.

You should be able to find out the “cost per lead” for each of the ads you have purchased. For example, if you paid $1000 for an ad somewhere and you received 10 phone calls from that ad, your cost per lead is $100. Think of it this way, when that phone rings, you are spending $100.

Being able to find your cost per lead for each of your paid ads is essential to becoming more efficient. This information will allow you to make educated decisions when the contracts for your ads expire. You will know which ads to keep and which to drop. You may decide to change the language in one ad to see if you can create different results. You may decide to take the money from one ad and use it to increase the size of another ad that is working better. If you do not have a system in place allowing you to track your cost per lead, you are just shooting in the dark, wasting your money and time. That is inefficient.

This next point is important. If you do decide to change an element in your weakest advertisement, make sure you only change one thing at a time. In the long run, this will give you clearer understanding as to whether or not the changes you have made are working. If you change too much all at once, you have no idea what specific alteration created the change, good or bad, and it will be harder for you to repeat the action in the future.