Portrait Photography Sales - The Gap Between Loving an Image and Making a Purchase
However fabulous it may be, an image on a screen doesn't actually represent a physical thing that a customer could buy. It's small but important point - the image might provoke a strong and positive emotional reaction, which would readily convert into a desire to buy, but the desire won't turn into action unless you can show them a very specific object they can focus that desire on.
As a photographer, you're likely to be a highly visually-oriented person. That fact, together with being familiar with your own products, means you as an individual will easily be able to visualize any particular finished product yourself - and you probably do that routinely. Most customers aren't able to do that though; they don't have your skills or experience - that's one reason why they've come to you.
Plus, other businesses competing for consumer's disposable income are making life more difficult in this respect. In working hard to be easy to do business with, many companies are actively 'training' customers to sit back and do a lot less of the work in the buying process. Kitchen companies provide 3D walkthroughs of new kitchens; Pizza companies will bring you fresh, hot pizza within minutes of you pressing a button on your TV remote. So, fewer and fewer people will be coming to you with any expectation of having to help you sell them things - they're used to getting everything 'on a plate'.
In the context of portrait photography, this means that not being able to quickly and accurately visualize real buyable products represents a significant and growing psychological hurdle in the buying process for your customers. If you don't do something about that, you could be inadvertently denying them any number of opportunities to buy from you and that could be costing you hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds a week in lost sales.
In contrast, if you were to actually show people a lifelike, life-sized simulation of an image they love, as a framed portrait maybe, then they can see vividly for themselves how it's going to look at home and you've given them something absolutely tangible to want - and to buy.
It might seem like this could be achieved by showing the customer similar examples of framed portraits you already have, of other families, but in practice it's ineffective. By introducing strangers, you immediately lose the impact of connecting the customers' own image, which they've now formed an emotional connection with, and the tangible version they could take home. It's also pretty impractical to do this anyway if you don't have a permanent area to hang samples in; and then there's the cost - a decent range of finished prints in mounts and mouldings could easily add up to several hundred pounds.
Creating simulations in Photoshop would work; but even if you're really handy, it will still be relatively time-consuming to go through a variety of options which will mean that a) the viewing takes longer than your customer's got patience for and b), that you limit the number of viewings you can get through in a day. Maybe not a problem when you're starting out and have plenty of time but it's never a good idea to undervalue your time and if you're lucky enough to get really busy, it'll be a problem.
A better solution is to use purpose-built software for Viewings: a product with the capability to show single images, multi-mounts, panoramics and collages, as well as simulating real-life mounts and mouldings, all calibrated to life-size - ideally shown via a data projector.
Real-world results from more than 100 UK photographic businesses using such software in this way have shown significant increases in customer purchasing - increases of more than 150% in portrait averages are not unusual.
Related Tags: desire, sales, buy, visualize, action, portrait, viewing
Simon Birkby http://www.bowride.co.uk +44 (0)207 871 2570
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