If you read this post about stepping into the luxury portrait market, then you’d remember that one of the six steps I recommend is to add albums to your client services. Albums aren’t just for brides and grooms! Whether you’re a family, motherhood, maternity, newborn, birth, milestone, or couples photographer, offering albums for your portrait sessions is the key to serving your clients well.
Why Offer Albums?
Offering print products, wall art, and heirloom albums to your clients takes your service to the next level in so many ways. Offering tangible products continues the top-notch service experience you provide and helps you stand out from the sea of other photographers.
Albums allow you the opportunity to continue serving your clients by helping them to preserve not only their favorite images but their memories for generations to come. While digital photos tend to get stored away on a hard drive, albums are often put on display and shared with loved ones over and over again. My kids love looking through my husband’s and my album from our wedding day. I know that your clients’ kids would also love seeing their own baby photos on display too. It’s such a fun tradition for parents to flip through newborn albums on each child’s birthday as they grow older.
Which Album Company Should I Use?
The first step to getting started with offering albums is to choose your album provider. As with everything I offer, high quality is the way to go. The fine art albums and artwork from Indie Print Company and RedTree Albums are my go-tos. If you’re a professional photographer, you can start an account with both companies for free. For album design and online client proofing, I use AlbumStomp and AlbumPrüfr, respectively.
Familiarize Yourself with Albums
Once you’ve chosen the album company you want to use, take the time to familiarize yourself with their products. Look over their sales and pricing tools as well. Make sure you know what they offer, the options your clients will have when designing albums for them, what each base album includes and what’s considered an upgrade, and get comfortable with using their album design software or process.
When it comes to designing the album itself, you can use a third party software like AlbumStomp. I’ve only ever used the design program that Kiss offers and it’s worked great for me! Their free account includes many wonderful templates for each spread. After having my Kiss account for about a year, I chose to upgrade to the Pro Kiss account. It’s just $99 per year. Kiss PRO includes more design template options, more active designs, and other features.
If you use Showit or Elementor with WordPress for your website, I also suggest purchasing Davey & Krista’s Album Sales Template add-on page. It’s preloaded with all of Kiss Books’ sizes, features, fabric options, upgrades, and more. All you have to do is add your album pricing and brand images. Easy peasy!
How Do I Get Clients to Buy an Album?
Seeing is believing! It’s important that you build a couple different sample albums to show to your clients. Once they’re able to get the albums in their hands, they’ll fall in love! I suggest making a basic sample album and a “bells and whistles” sample album that includes all the upgrades available. This way, the client can see and feel the difference between the two. If you use Kiss Books, your basic sample album will likely be an 8×8 album with thin pages, luster paper, in a linen fabric with no cover upgrades. Your “bells and whistles” sample, on the other hand, will be either a 10×10 or 12×12 album, with thick pages, matte paper, in a leather or suede fabric with either a cameo or engraved cover.
I also suggest purchasing the entire sample fabric swatch collection from Kiss. Your clients will want to see and feel the fabrics in person. You can bring your sample albums with you to your newborn sessions and allow clients to look through them while you take the baby’s individual photos. Maybe you even offer a special discount or free upgrade when they decide to add an album onto their package that day!
Want to learn more??
I hope this post was helpful! I promise, offering albums for your portrait sessions is so important.
I’d love to teach you even more about albums. I want you to feel confident in building and selling them to your clients! Inside the Membership for Motherhood Photographers, I dive way deep into this topic and show members my Kiss Books dashboard, how I design an album using Kiss’s software, how many images to include in a portrait session album, how much to mark-up album prices, bonus tips for selling albums, and so much more. My business bonus lessons are typically 30 minutes but I had so much to share that this lesson is a whole hour long!
If you’re not a member yet, what are you waiting for?? Join today for just $17/month or $170/year (that’s two months for free!). Every month, members get to watch a new behind-the-scenes video from a real maternity or newborn session, a business masterclass, and participate in a group coach call. It’s ongoing education, on your time, on your budget!
