In yesterday’s blog post I discussed a couple of easy ways to adjust your pricing so that your customer orders the sizes that are the easiest for you to produce. In the second part of this series, I’ll go over two easy ways to adjust your pricing to make more money.

The first step is to identify your major bread winner, and promote it heavily. The second is to give a discount on multiples.

Promote the Bread Winner
Take the time to look at your current product offering. Is there one particular type of print you make a lot more money on than usual? Identify this offering and promote it. Many photographers and print producers have realized that they can make huge profits from canvas and fabric prints. If you have a wide-format printer and don’t offer these solutions to your customers, you may want to reevaluate this opportunity.

Let’s say you charge $200 for a 16 in. x 20 in. stretched and framed canvas print. Your ink and material costs are $4.20 for canvas and ink, $1 for Sunset Gloss Coating and $27 for a Sunset Pro Stretcher Kit. You pay yourself $50 per hour, and spend 15 minutes color correcting the file, and 30 minutes finishing the print:

Price                                                      $200
Material Cost                                     -$32.20 (ink, canvas, bars, and coating)
Labor                                                     -$37.50 ($50 per hour x .75 hours)
Profit                                                     $130.30

(Note: these figures may not reflect the normal pricing in your area.)

That’s a lot of profit, especially when you consider that you paid yourself $50 per hour to make the canvas print. Since you have so much profit, you have room to play. Try running promotions at different percentage discounts and take notes on the results.

Eventually you will learn what discount rate works best in your area to increase your profit. I’ve heard photographers say that they do make more money than usual when they sell a canvas print, but they don’t sell that many. So, if dropping the price of this size and type of print by 20 percent (down to $160) enables you to sell 30 in a month as opposed to 15, then that would be worth it according to the math below…

Month 1 – 15 x $130.80 = $1,962.00
Month 2 – 30 x $117.45 = $3,523.50

That’s a big increase in profit month over a month. You should be aware that this increase in volume took up an extra 11 hours and 15 minutes of your time, but you did get paid for that extra time at a rate of $50 per hour. Do some research to find out which works best for you, put that discount plan into action, and collect the extra money!

Discounts on Multiples
This is a quick and easy pricing idea. The initial cost of producing a print is the highest. You have to shoot the shot, color correct it, crop it to size, and then print. However, in order to make another reproduction you will usually just have to change the number of copies in the OEM driver or RIP you are running from one to two.

Since there is really no additional labor involved, especially if you are making a print that the printer cuts to bleed (see Part 1 from yesterday), then you should encourage your customer to purchase more by offering multiples at a discount.

They probably wouldn’t buy more than one if there was not a discount, so this is a great way to get more money from an existing customer. It is far less expensive to get an order from an existing client than it is to find a new client.