By Johl Dunn
I ran a successful portrait photography business for over 20yrs, so the following advice is tried and tested and refined over 1000’s of clients in that time.
What I want to outline below is how to use sales psychology to not only maximise the purchasing appointment for your business but also have your clients buying products that they will love and display.
When you are putting together your price list less is more, and the key rule is to keep it simple. The biggest mistake I see with photographers that I coach is that their price lists are complicated and confusing. It should be that simple that you can teach a 10yr old to memorise it in an hour.
For the purpose of this post, I want to give you an understanding on how we sold our ‘off the wall products’ specifically the matted prints and the box sets. It was very simple we had three options for ‘off the wall products’
When you have 3 options, and they are priced right 80% of customers will gravitate towards the middle package. This should be priced at about what you want to average sale to be.
We started these cheaper as we were building up our confidence but when we finished up the business, we were selling the 5 set for $1578 and the 10 box for $2778.
Let’s look at my 4 tips to effectively selling these products
(1) Don’t give too much in the first option
When we started, we were seeing that too many clients were going for the 5 set of images. Now I must add that at this point that all our packages gave the clients the digital copies of whatever images they ordered. We made one small change, which was to take the digitals out of the 5 set and make them an extra $250.
We found this dramatically decreased clients taking this option.
The reason was that instead of being an $1200 extra to jump to the next package for 5 additional photos and a display box, it then came down to $950 for 10images both printed and digitally and a display box once they added in the extra cost for the digitals with the 5 images. This seemed to be just low enough for them to make the decision to go for the 10 set as most really loved more photos so they could justify spending the extra money to secure them.
(2) In your client’s mind there is value in more images
Another thing we did is consciously kept the price of one of our most popular wall arts (a 30”x30” frame 4 photo collage) at the same price as the 10-box set. The reason for this is inevitably some clients would love the collage we put together but be struggling to make a decision because they loved so many photos, but the frame only gave them the option to put their 4 favourites in.
When this would happen, we would then move them towards the box set option for a few reasons. Firstly, they were obviously getting close to what they were comfortable spending and were hesitating with the sale and secondly, we had an option where we would still make a great sale and the client would walk away happy because they were getting more photos (perceived value) so it was a win/win.
We would simply say ‘well we also have this box set option where you get 10 images mounted ready to pop straight into a frame or keep displayed in this beautiful box’, and most of a time it was a no brainer for them. And this leads me into tip 3.
(3) Upsell and add in prints
The majority of the time we did these box sets there were always more than 10 photos that they loved, and they would struggle to cull them down.
When this was the case, we always would say something along the lines of ‘What we can do because you are getting the box set and struggling to cut any more out, is if you want any extra prints, we can do them for $200 instead of $278 each’.
They loved this as they were getting a discount and it is almost pure profit for you as the business owner.
(4) Our rule on selling the matted images individually
We would only sell the matted prints individually and not as a set of 5 or 10 when the client had already purchased one of our wall art collections.
So, after they had committed to buying a wall art collection, we would always have images in their favourites folder they didn’t have in the collection.
We would simply say ‘so what would you like to do with these photos?’ and depending on what they would say if 5 or 10 was too much we would then
give them the option of buying them individually for either full price or sometimes $200 if we thought it would get them over the line.
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Johl Dunn,
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As you can see the matted prints and box sets from Global Image Products can be a real staple of your offerings and can be sold at a great price with a low cost of goods.
Now with the all inclusive build-a-box option it is a fantastic time saver for your business as well.
If you have any questions or want to discuss if coaching may be right for you, email me johl@jdmindsetcoaching.com.au or go straight to the website to book in a call www.johldunn.com or follow along for more tips on Instagram @johldunn