We’ve talked about calculating portrait prices and about being brave enough to price your portraits for profit. You have the price of a 5×7. You’re determined to charge appropriately for your time.
How do you get your clients to spend X, where X represents your happy place?
Portrait collections. I’ll tell you, until I agreed to be the grammar fairy and sous chef for Alicia Caine, I thought portrait collections were straight-up stupid. I tried them, failed with them, and gave up on them. And then I got smart. I listened to Alicia.
Collections are building blocks. If collection #1 has block A, collection #2 has block A & B. Collection #3 — blocks A, B, and C.
If your collections are complicated, clients are going to buy items a la carte. If your collections are designed like building blocks, clients will move on up the collection ladder until they find the one that suits them. And then purchase it.
A quite spiffy example using arbitrary portrait products…
Collection #1: 5 8×10′s
Collection #2: 5 8×10′s and 3 wall portraits
Collection #3: 5 8×10′s, 3 wall portraits and the session’s digital negatives
There’s no confusion there. The collection assumes that OF COURSE you’ll want building block A, you’ll probably want building block B, and we’ll do a dance all the way to the credit card terminal if you’d like building block C, too. Your clients will be happy to enjoy savings over your a la carte pricing, and you’ll be happy to have reached your sales goal with ‘em.
If your brain just exploded because that’s so simple but you wouldn’t have thought of it, you should probably check out the Easy as Pie Portrait Pricing Guide. The whole book is like that. Code Camper30 saves you $30.
