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glort Offline [X]
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Russ Isabella wrote:
Stop offering 4x6's. Strong image quality deserves a larger palette, and it may help your pricing issues as well.
Couldn't agree more!
I have been harping on about this for years and always get the " But my customers won't buy/ can't afford larger prints or some other horse feather excuse.
I did sports events for over 3 years and NEVER did 6x4's. Only did 5x7's by special request and then 2 at a time. My basic offering was 8x12's and never had a problem with that. Base price was $30. They went up for borders and mag covers to $40. I don't remember anymore than a handfull of people ever whingeing about price. Of course I'd be worried if someone didn't.
For social events I was doing 5x7 and a min but have now gone to 6x8's as I can cut A4 paper in half which is a lot more economical on the price I can get than 5x7 sheets. People are always wowed by the larger print size.
I think the people that won't stop doing 6x4's are the people that have never had the gumption to stop offering them for their own insecure reasons. Of course if you train your customers up to getting used to buying postage stamps for $2.50 ( and yes, I have seen loads of people at that price point!) then trying to get them to spend more on larger prints is going to be an ask.
I really don't get how people offering Postage stamp 6x4's make any remotely worthwhile money.
The amount you have to sell to add up to anything decent for a days work would be worlds beyond any event I have covered and the stuffing around going through the files finding the ones you want, prepping the images and print or burning it is exactly the same as you have to do for larger, far more profitable pics.
I buy A4 photo paper in bulk for about .16C a sheet. I sell said print for $30+ How much am I going to get for a postage stamp? $15 would seem to be pushing it way hard where I am. $10 would be the max I think people would not rensent. Maybe. So I would have to sell at least 3 times more pics to break even on what I'm doing now with the larger ones. Not a hope in hell that's going to happen!
Only so many people at an event and they buy what they want generally as cheap as they can get out of it not buy more because they are cheap.
At most things I do, there is no way we could keep up with 3 times the printing. I know ordering is more important but if I posted the prints, that's more time and cost in packaging for a start. Also there would undoubetely be lost or damaged orders in the post.
Forget it.
A4's @ $30 work just fine for me and I'll stick to it.
I agree with the 5 rules posted here with the expantion of point 3, ease and speed of viewing. I think this goes hand in hand with ordering. I'm just amazed anyone does online ordering / viewing as their primary sales method these days. My experience was I may as well just put the pics on a computer at the event and let people come up and burn their own CD's or copy the images to a USB drive.
If I couldn't do onsite ordering, I wouldn't even bother considering doing a job. In 99% of cases I do onsite delivery as well be that by prints or on USB. I know some very successful people do online sales as a backup to their onsite ordering but from what I have seen, that is a very secondary strategy to the onsite mainly to pick up extra orders not as their core business.
Online has so many problems these days I can't for the life of me understand why people contemplate it as their only sales strategy. Sure, by doing onsite ordering only you will sose some orders. The thing is though, at the end of the day you'll make a lot less money and lose far more orders with online.
People go on about the problems and cost in setting up Vstations etc. I bought 2nd hand computers, laptops in the end, cheap as chips that worked perfectly and used Free software to run it all. The software NEVER gave me any grief and apart from the occasional networking glitch that we could always work around anyway, there were never any big issues.
I tried the online, I mean I REALLY tried to make it work but it just didn't. We promoted and wallpapered every car in the carpark with the web address but the orders were non existant. All I did achieve was to see a big drop in my onsite sales as well from all the people that were going to order when they got home but clearly never did.
I stopped the online ordering and the few people that complained the loudest were the ones that said they didn't have time to look at the event then hung around looking longer and ordering more than everyone else.
YA!
I also agree with the comment of offering Digital. In one of my most lucrative markets I have gone to that completely now. It eliminates all the problems of onsite printing and/ or postage, it allows just as many or more pricing/ bonus value added strategys and above all has a lot of customer wow factor.
My average order with the USB's is a LOT higher than with the printing given we offer attractive multiple image bundles.
I am getting themed USB sticks from Chinese suppliers at less than a buck each and have a variety of styles suitable for boys and girls and something more stylish for adults. I also get the USB's styled to the events I'm doing. Fish, sharks, whales and Nemo's for the swimming, Ponys for equine etc.
This works great in replacing the big yes/ no/ cost decisions to the minor " What charachter would you like your pics put on?" which makes it easy to close sales with the assistance of kids pester power and guilt factor to the parents.
I have read loads of waffle from shooters whom overvalue their self importance and that of their work carrying on about garbage relating to " What if they have a bad print made at Costmart from the digital files? " and other ignorant sentiments with the implication that their reputation will be so sullied that no one will ever hire them to take another photograph in thier lives and their family name will be tarnished for the next 10 generations.
Piffle!
So what if they do get a bad print made? You think there is anyone out there that stupid that they are going to look at a perfectly good pic on their computer screens, get a crap print and then blame you instead of who printed it? If anyone does think that they ought to stop reading crap on the net and got out in the real world for a reality check.
I have sold THOUSANDS of digital images over the last 5 years alone and never had a single person complain about bad prints or anything else and a lot of these people I sold to numerous times over several years. Not like they couldn't find me or let me know if they werent happy.
Digital is much more in demand now and people want images that way for portability as much as anything else. people want to have digital for slide shows, to put on their phones, email and all the rest. They can still get prints made so it ticks all the boxes.
People who refuse to sell digital files are going to get left well and truly behind although it may wake them up to the fact of satisfying the needs of the customer is more important than satisfying the needs of their own ego massaging.
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Jun 12, 2014 at 08:32 PM |
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