With PhotoDay, launching your volume photography business into online selling is easy. Not only will you save countless hours of mundane paperwork, but you'll also create an elevated experience for your customers while reaching new business goals.
One way PhotoDay helps you achieve this is through strategic offers and promotions. In this blog, we’ll cover the basics of offers and promotions in PhotoDay and how offering discounts to your customers is an effective way to boost sales and gallery engagement!
Why you should include offers and promotions
Offers and promotions are a vital part of your online marketing plan. When used strategically, they can inspire a whole new way to connect with and delight your customers!
Before you create and advertise an offer, consider the end goal. Offers incentivize customers to spend more sooner. While many parents are committed to buying their kids’ photos no matter what, the primary target of your order urgency campaigns is the parent still undecided or unmotivated to order.
Customizing your offer types
You can create two main types of offers in PhotoDay: Discounts and Free Shipping.
With a discount offer, you can create percentage off and fixed dollar amount off discounts. With a free shipping offer, you can give your customers free economy shipping. You can also include free shipping with a discount offer to create an even more enticing combo.
*It's important to note that your customers can only use one offer per transaction.
Now that you know PhotoDay’s foundational offer types, let’s explore how you can apply them.
How to get the word out to customers
PhotoDay strives to make each step of your workflow as seamless and automated as possible. Communicating with customers about published galleries and relevant offers is no different!
- AdvancePay Offers: One of our most popular features is AdvancePay—which gives photographers the benefit of getting paid before picture day without limiting sales after picture day.
When setting up AdvancePay, you can create an accompanying AdvancePay Offer available only to customers purchasing AdvancePay credits. Doing so helps encourage early spending while spreading the word about the gallery. - Gallery Offers: A Gallery Offer lets you attach an offer to a published gallery. PhotoDay will display a banner at the top of the gallery as customers shop. If your offer has a minimum order rule, PhotoDay will prompt your customer to add more to their cart to redeem it! It’s a smooth, user-friendly way to offer all of your customers a special deal for a limited time.
- Automatic SMS & Email Reminder Campaigns: We love automated communication here at PhotoDay! Once you’ve created your Gallery Offer or AdvancePay Offer, it will be included by default in the text reminder campaigns (for all job types) and email reminder campaigns (for private gallery jobs).
- Manual Marketing Flyers: Flyers are PhotoDay’s built-in solution for manually promoting published photos (and Picture Day itself) through email, print, and/or an HTML link. They include useful details—including special offers—that will help guide your potential customers to your gallery, where they can easily find and purchase their photos.
- Custom SMS Promos: Stay connected to your customers with PhotoDay’s Custom SMS Promos feature. From your Studio Panel, you can add any jobs published less than 365 days ago into a special promotion series and watch additional revenue roll in.
Here’s how it works: We’ll text every customer who has opted into that gallery and let them know about the special offer. Get ready to boost your gallery sales with these custom series to notify customers of a flash sale, upcoming price increases, fundraiser deadlines, new photos added to a gallery, & more!
Making offers work for your business
You might be thinking, “But won’t I lose money if I hand out discounts or free shipping?” Here’s a pro tip: Don’t worry about losing sales by offering promotions. Customers already committed to purchasing often end up spending even more than they would have if no promotions were available! And remember, your target customers are the ones who are still undecided about buying photos.
However, here are a few ways to make sure your sales are protected while creating offer codes:
- Include a minimum purchase amount to help encourage higher-order values.
- Create urgency by including an expiration date, making it a limited-time offer.
- Set a maximum amount of redemptions for each code to incentivize early spending.
If you’re looking to offer savings opportunities for your customers without creating any discount or free shipping codes, consider the following:
- Build enticing discounts right into your packages. Be sure to advertise how much they can save in the package description! You can also easily include social sharing downloads in a package “for free” with our 48 Hour Social Sharing Download custom promo series.
- Speaking of digital downloads, utilize PhotoDay’s digital download bundling to reward customers for buying more of their favorite photos. Downloads are popular, high-profit items, making them ideal low-cost products for promotions.
Get inspired by these real-life examples
Use Case: AdvancePay Offer
Marcy is photographing a football league and offering “Get 10% off when you spend $40” for everyone who purchases an AdvancePay credit. This encourages customers to pre-pay and ensures a minimum order amount.
Use Case: Gallery Offer + Custom Promo
Jake is ready to publish school portraits with an attached Gallery Offer of “Get free shipping when you spend $35.” He also requests a Custom SMS Promo for a free social sharing download included in every package for the first 48 hours only. Two days after publishing the gallery, Jake will swap out the price sheet for their original one (without the free social sharing download in each package).
Use Case: Gallery Offer
Olive wants to add some friendly competition to her next gallery launch. When she’s done editing her dance photos and is ready to share them, she prepares a Gallery Offer of “Get $15 off for the first 20 customers.” This takes order urgency to a whole new level as customers race to place their orders first.
Naming your offer codes: get creative!
While PhotoDay can autogenerate discount codes for you, we recommend changing them to something memorable and creative! Need some inspiration?
Why not try it for yourself?
Once you discover the right promotion mix for your studio and customers, sit back and watch your sales and AOVs climb. PhotoDay has everything you need to automate your marketing strategy job after job.
All of our features are designed to work together beautifully and seamlessly. The automated ease of our text and email communication and the simplicity of creating offers make it a time-saving switch that helps you streamline your workflow so you can focus more on what you love—capturing incredible photos.
Our Customer Success Team is always ready to help when you have questions! Book a complimentary 1:1 demo to see how PhotoDay can simplify your business—and life!
Want to keep learning? Explore our recommended resources:
- Webinars: Upcoming & Replays
- Blog: Crafting Urgency: Creative Solutions for Early Sales
- Blog: Boost Your AOV with AdvancePay
- Blog: 5 Ways to Boost Gallery Sales
