This seems to be a very popular topic these days. Do Internet sales work? How do you market photography online with reasonable success? Well, yes, Internet sales do work to varying degrees for various people. What methods people use to market their storefront are just as varied. There are some subtle marketing tips that will help you along the way.
- Simply putting images on the Internet for sale will not guarantee you a single sale if your customers do not know about your online storefront. I liken to opening a retail store on the other side of your town away from all of the other retail establishments and out by the steel mill. You may have the exact product that the consumer wants, but if they don’t know where to find you they will never be able to buy your product.Market your storefront in everything that you do. Place it on your main website, business cards, letters and emails. Tell everyone that you come in to contact with where to find your product. Place a small flyer into every single order that you deliver telling your customers where they can buy more of your product. For most effective results market your main website and make catalogs available there. This gives you the opportunity to mention sales, display product samples and sell your customer on the product that you deliver. All things that are not done effectively on an ecommerce site. Be proactive in your marketing. Collect email addresses and notify interested people when your images are available. Follow up with future emails about any sale or special that you have that could apply to them and finally follow up with an email when the catalog is due to expire from your sales website.
- Posting unedited images for sale online invites the customer to not buy from you, and to never come again! Every catalog should be edited for obvious rejects and images that you present should have proper white balance and should be adjusted for brightness, contrast and exposure to the point where the customer can see what it is that you want them to buy. We aren’t talking about finished print corrections. Just good enough for the customer to make a selection from. Every ecommerce site that I have seen adds a disclaimer like this one from Photoreflect: “Large zoom is provided as a convenience and does not represent the high quality product you will receive.” That’s not good enough. There is no excuse for losing sales from not editing images before posting them for sale online.
- Post your images NOW! Regardless of the subject matter that you are shooting, the quicker that you post the images for sale the better your chances that you will entice a customer. Have your images edited and posted as quickly as possible, but certainly within 48 hours of the event. If you cross that 48 hour mark you will lose the interest of most people that would have come and looked with the intention of making a purchase. My goal was to always have my catalogs posted by the same evening of morning or afternoon events and by the next morning for an evening event. Not my own brilliant discovery. Every single seminar or class that I have ever been to all said the exact same thing. 24 to 48 hours or the only person that will lose is you.
- Set an expiration date for every catalog that you post. Leaving catalogs posted for an unlimited amount of time allows an otherwise interested customer to put off the decision to the point of forgetting about you entirely. Give people somewhere between two and four weeks to buy and then the images come down.In a case where you are photographing a series of events for the same group, such as photographing all of the sports for a school, leave your catalogs published until the end of the school year. In any case make clear that your catalogs will expire and what that date is.
- Price is key. I am not advocating being the lowest priced photographer in your market nor the highest. You should however make certain that the price you charge covers your costs and fees as well as providing you with a good profit margin for your product. Set your prices so that you are realistic for your market and profitable.Sales and specials can be used for multi print purchases. Do not just take a percentage off of every single print. Make a discount come in to play only after a purchase has been made at your full selling price.
- While not directly related to how you present yourself, you cannot be obsessed with people that will only come to your site to do a screen grab of your images and not buy a thing. It will happen. Hear me when I write this to you; They were never your customer and aren’t even likely to ever become one. You certainly should take advantage of watermarking your images to try to discourage this kind of “casual theft”, but don’t take things to extremes and punish (turn away) people that actually do want to give you money.
- Remember this one thing; Very few people make the bulk of their money from online photo sales. True, some do. For the majority of the photographic community, not so much. Online sales should be viewed as an additional revenue stream, not your primary revenue stream.
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Filed under: ExpressDigital, Marketing, Photoreflect.com
