5 Ideas That Can Have a Big Impact on Your Bottom Line

Most photographers spend the majority of their time and energy trying to book new business, often missing out on numerous sales opportunities right under their nose. In today's post, I'll share five strategies that can significantly impact your sales without booking any new business.

1. Create An Offer that Your Customers Can’t Resist

Over the years, we've used several different techniques to entice customers to purchase larger packages. The key to success is making the offer so irresistible that it's almost impossible for customers to say no. People will take action when the perceived value of the offer seems higher than the risk.

For example, this season we have an offer for our dance schools that's working exceptionally well. Here's the deal: last year we ran a $90 average order with dance school orders, but wanted to increase the average this year.

First, we introduced a new 5×10 framed portrait with a retail price of $29. While this product has a high perceived value, it actually costs the studio less than $4 to produce. Since this product has such high perceived value, we used it as a free bonus item for parents who placed an order of $125 or more. For this to work, please make sure you have samples on hand for parents to see. This promotion has been so successful this year that we're about to order another five cases of frames.

We have an exciting new offer we're finalizing now for Fall that looks like it's going to be a real winner. Stay tuned.

2. Up Selling

If you spend the necessary time training your cashiers properly, you have the opportunity to dramatically increase your margins on each transaction by offering an up-sell. Whether you realize it or not, you see it in action every day, and these little up-sells can make a huge difference at the end of the year. For example, yesterday I went to lunch at Arby's and ordered a #2 combo. As the cashier was ringing up my order, she asked, “Would you like to make that a large for only $.80 more?” Yes, I think I would. While I have no idea how many up-sells Arby's and McDonald's do every day, I can only imagine these little $.80 and $1 up-sells equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of the year.

I know what you're thinking: that's great Mike, but how does that fit into our world? Here are a couple examples for sports and dance.

In the dance school market, we offer standard prints and up-sell options such as framing and mounting. Anytime a customer purchases anything larger than an 8×10, we make sure to offer the options for mounting and framing. At the end of the year, this adds up to an additional $8K in sales. This up-sell is really a win-win for everyone. The customer was probably going to end up going to the local Walmart or Michaels for mounting and framing anyway. They get a better product and service from you, and you get the additional sales. Win-win.

On the sports side of the business, we've done similar things over the years by offering different products from Neil Enterprise such as frames and other miscellaneous products as an up-sell on photo day.

Another idea to help create excitement and a competitive environment among your table staff and cashiers is to run a competition for the person with the highest sales for the day. For example, whoever up-sells the most frames for the day gets a $50 bonus. Just make sure you set a minimum sales requirement so you cover your costs.

3. Offer Opportunity for Re-Orders

I'm still amazed at the number of photographers who don't offer their customers the opportunity for reorders. There are a couple of easy ways to do this. First, the simplest and easiest way is to insert an order form and re-order form in each player's package that could be filled out and mailed back to the studio. The second and more efficient way is to host all images online to give parents and grandparents the opportunity to place re-orders. You can do this yourself or rely on your lab to provide these services for you, such as Got Photo, Captura and others.

Many photographers are already collecting email addresses on the order form but aren't using them. Why? In his book “The E-Myth Revisited,” Michael Gerber said one of the keys to building a scalable business is automation and delegation. While we certainly haven't completely automated or mastered online reselling yet, it continues to get better every season. The one thing I can tell you is that every time we send out a follow-up email, we make sales. For example, just before the holiday season last year, we sent out several follow-up email campaigns promoting seasonal products for re-order opportunities. As soon as the emails went out, the sales started coming in. One interesting thing was that even though we were promoting a particular holiday product, the sales that came in were for various products. The email was simply a reminder that the images were available for purchase.

While we didn't make enough money to retire, we were able to pick up an additional $4K in sales with very little effort.

4. Cross Sale

I know, I know, cross-selling, up-selling, etc.—what's the difference? Cross-selling to your customer usually happens after they've already purchased something from you and you've established a relationship with them. It typically occurs over a longer period of time.

Since the customer has already purchased from you and had a good experience, they will be more comfortable purchasing from you again. In marketing, this is often referred to as the “trip wire.” While this probably sounds a little sinister, the concept is that after the customer purchases a smaller package and you have earned their trust and respect, you now have the opportunity to up-sell them to a larger, more expensive product line.

Here are a couple ideas:

• Remember the email list we built when we did the data entry from our jobs for sending out emails for re-orders? What if you sent out an email to that same list just before the holiday season promoting your holiday family portrait sessions? Or sent out a targeted email or postcard to all the dance school parents promoting your children's portraiture? These are both very low-cost promotions.
• What about team banners? Are you selling all the team banners to the leagues you're already photographing? No? Why not? I can tell you why—you're not asking for the business. Simply put, they probably don't even know that you offer that service. Let's fix that now.

Grab the team banner marketing kit.

Customize the flyer and order form with your studio logo and phone number. Train your team photographer to make a 15-second sales pitch to the coach immediately following the team picture. Most teams and coaches are getting their banners from the local sign company simply because they didn't know you offered them. Make it easy for them to buy from you.

5. Your Guarantee

Your guarantee is your secret weapon. You should always provide the strongest guarantee possible. Have you ever had a parent question pre-paying for a package sight unseen? Our answer has always been, “If you don't like it, we have a 100% money-back guarantee—no questions asked.” That puts the customer at ease and takes the risk out of the purchase. However, if you're going to say that, you have to do it without making them jump through hoops.

Why isn't everyone doing this? The perception is that if you provide an aggressive guarantee, customers are going to take advantage of you. That's simply not true—most people don't.

Question: What great ideas do you have that that can help increase sales? Please leave a comment below.