Want to Make Some Extra Holiday Cash This Year?

We could all use a little extra cash around the holidays, right?

For the past couple of years we have offered a holiday print sale promotion to our clients, and the response has been very positive. It’s really easy to do and doesn’t take too much time to implement.

Here’s the sale in a nutshell: right around thanksgiving we send out an email to clients letting them know about a 2-1 holiday sale. The key is to really promote it. If you don’t send out a series of 4+ emails about it, the sale probably won’t be nearly as effective. As the sale comes to a close, you need to send out those last minute reminders, ‘Last 24 hours’ type of emails in order to maximize your sales.

We do the sale as a 2-1 because we retouch each print, and so that keeps the workload minimal on the production side. We pitch the ideas as a great way to get holiday gifts for friends and family.

Here are the steps:

1. If you have an online kart or gallery system, activate all the galleries from the past year or longer.
2. Send out an email to all the friends and family that have logged into the galleries, explaining that the galleries were back up for 1 week only during this annual sale, and anything they order, they would receive a free duplicate.
3. We played up the duplicate prints as great holiday gifts, and there were no extra retouching costs, cropping or anything, so minimal production time on the freebies.

Promotions:

• Blogged about the print sale, with several intervals-1 week only, 2 days left, etc.

• Facebook status updates about the print sale.

• We emailed our brides separately, encouraging them to take advantage of the sale. Many of our packages include a small print credit, so we let them know they should use their credit during the sale in order to maximize it. Most of them end up purchasing a lot more than their credit.

We’ve tried running the promotion for an entire month, but have found 1-2 weeks gets the best response. The reason is because it needs to feel urgent, like they need to place the order when they look in the gallery the first time, not sometime later. We have found a week is just long enough to run the promotion and we’ve had the best sales with that approach.

One tip I can offer is that if you cut the galleries off, remember that midnight on the East Coast is different than on the West Coast. When our galleries went down at 10pm, Pacific time a few years ago, a handful of clients actually called us in the studio, panicked as they were in the middle of placing their order. So be sure to allow those last minute orders a little extra time to finish placing their orders. Also, be prepared to receive a lot of calls on the final day of the sale, I recommend scheduling it so the sale ends on an office day so you can be available to help people with their orders.

Do you have more great tips for our readers? Please share them in the comments below.

Tagged as: holiday photography promotions, holiday photography sales, holiday print sale, photography marketing, photography sales