Pricing is my nightmare. Please critique!

meadowlarkphoto

Hi everyone, I am new to the smugmug forum (transferred from pictage, if it matters) and am in the first stages of going pro. Long story short, my business is in central Montana and I am trying to price accordingly for wedding photography. The ave. spent on wedding photography for this area (to the best of my knowledge) is $1314 to $2200. I am mostly interested in directing people to my middle two packages. In case someone wonders, the median income in my county is $31,000/year. My website is www.meadowlarkphoto.com. Tomorrow I will work on my profile.

I named them the packages after birds, but I am still deciding if that's cheesy so for now, it's A, B whatever....

Thanks in advance for your help!


Pricing so far:

Package A
$1250
• 8 hours of wedding day coverage
• $150 credit to be applied toward prints,
albums or high-resolution digital files
• 15 of your favorite images
(with watermark) for Facebook
--

Package B
$1750
• 8 hours of wedding day coverage
• 1-hour engagement session
• 10 of your favorite high-resolution
engagement photos on dvd with printing rights
• custom save-the-date card design
• 25 of your favorite high-resolution wedding
day photos on dvd with printing rights
• $150 credit toward prints, albums
or high-resolution digital files
--

Package C
$2500
• 10 hours of wedding day coverage
• 1-hour engagement session
• All of your high-resolution engagement and
wedding day photos on dvds with printing rights
• custom save-the-date card design
• custom thank you card design
• a professional quality 10x10
flush mount wedding album
• $250 credit toward prints or additional albums
--

Package D
$3250
• 10 hours of wedding day coverage
• 1-hour engagement session
• All of your high-resolution engagement and
wedding day photos on dvds with printing rights
• custom save-the-date card design
• custom thank you card design
• a professional quality 10x10
flush mount wedding album
• 2 5x5 flush mount parent albums
• $500 credit toward prints or additional albums

meadowlarkphoto

BTW - I am looking for honest, constructive criticism. If the packages suck, by all means say so. I'd love it if you also recommended some suggestions tho.
- T

Snowgirl

Just curious - how did you come up with your packages and prices? Did you figure out your actual CODB? (cost of doing business) And then strike an hourly rate for your services PLUS the mark-up cost for each item in each package? If not - then the exercise is irrelevant. If you haven't done the CODB calculation, you're just guessing at best and probably going to go out of business quickly. I don't mean to sound harsh, but I've seen this happen time after time.

Glort

I probably won't be much help here as my pricing structure seems pretty left of field and a bit out there for most shooters.

I haven't had packages in about 15 years now. Haven't had a price list either. All my work is quoted for the individual job. I gave up on packages because it semed no matter what variations I made up, someone always wanted to add this or delete that so you were in effect making individual ones anyway.

Someone wants to know what I charge for a wedding, I tell them I quote each one individually, where is the church, reception, location for pics etc. Unlike snows Valid and correct pricing method, I know my costs but to me the biggest thing is tha pain in the butt factor and the more of that in the job the higher the price.

I work out what the people want and don;t want and then pull a figure out of the air basically depending on travel, time on the job, album and whaterver else the couple want. My pricing method is to make so much margin i don't have to wor k out the cost of doing business because i'm basing my price on what I think the max the client will pay with a back end for them to spend more if I get it wrong.

When asked price which is usually over the phone I find out all i can about the wedding and the couple and spend 30-45 min building Rapport with the ( generally) bride. I will quote a price when I have all the details and go on to give them all the info they need to make the buying decision. I don't know how many times I have booked jobs without them seeing a pic I have taken.

Often when the couple come into the studio the only pics they see are what is on the walls but they have already made the majority of the buying decision before they came in. the rest is pretty much formality. I ALWAYS write down what I have quoted on a plain piece of paper and give it to them and write it in my book and get them to initial it as well.

By not having price lists I take away the ammo the tyre kickers need o shop around and by not having packages, I can give each and every customer exactly what they want. Of course 9 times out of 10 I quote the same base coverage but it the customers perception that counts and they get exactly what they think they want.

With your packages, if you are going to do them and list them. put the most expensive first. By doing cheapest to dearest you are increasing the pain. By doing it the other way round, you give the impression people are missing out the lower they go and are cheaping out.

I would also put more difference in the coverage time. Make the one you want to sel the one with the time you know they will want. With the others, if they ask about extra hours, you have an ace in the hole to get them to book. You can to the affirmation sales strategy in that they like every thing and when are they looking to book and what about if they are happy to book right mow you'll make it easy and give them the extra coverage gratis.
It's always a good idea to keep something up your sleeve so you have a carrot to dangle to get them across the line.

What the clients see and what you hold back are two differnt things and its the clients perception that counts, NOT reality. You need to be clever with your marketing and pricing and don't just throw a bunch of numbers and rubbish at them they can't visualise or know what they are going to want, start out with a BASE coverage and then upsel from there when you have something they want and value to sell them.

An album with x amount of 8x10 prints is just numbers to them before the wedding. AFterwards it's a piece of their lives with significance.
To this end I do album planning. Start them off with say 20 pages in the album included and then each page is $150 a page extra. I pre design the album before the clients come back because " their pics were so great I wanted to do a layout for a studio demo album and this is what I came up with" and then do a 50-60 page layout.

Again, instead of increasing the pain with every page they add in, i make it that they are loosing something with every page they take out. Often i'll change a few pages for different pics and the albums are 90% the way I lad them out and i'll get the same money again as the initial coverage in extra's . the thing is though, had i tried to charge them that much for a package in the first place, most would have freaked and gone elsewhere because at that stage, it was just NUMBERS to them. Now it a piece of them and their lives.

Makes a huge difference when your trying to sell something to someone.

meadowlarkphoto

Thanks for your help guys. In answer to the question about the CODB I did do that. I used the pricing guide from Stacy Reeves, and found it very helpful. In looking over my stuff, I think the packages are too complicated. I am going to cut it down to three and make the choices more obvious. I'll also definitely do the more expensive one first. I would really like to push albums, because for personal reasons, I think they are sooooo important. (Long story short, I don't have a single image printed from my own wedding....)

Thanks for taking time to look over this everyone and I welcome more critique. Back to work I go.