How to Run a Black Friday Sale Without Hurting Your Business!

By Christine Tremoulet, Photographer
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When it comes to Black Friday sales for your photography business, you want to be mindful of what you are offering. Be careful to not create a sale that ends up costing you money, or one that turns your clients in to thinking that they can get a deal all the time.
After all, we all know those stores that have everything on sale all the time. When you walk in and you see things full price, you scoff and laugh, and tell yourself to return in a week or two, that item that you want will be on sale again. Do you want clients to think of you as that business? NO. So you need to be mindful of sales. You need to run one that won’t hurt your business!

My Black Friday Sale IdeaOne Thanksgiving night, while waiting for the stores to open at 4am, I had a crazy idea of something to do to kill the time while I waited to go shopping myself! I opened up all of my client galleries for the year that had already expired. Knowing my profit margin on print orders, I emailed everyone who had registered for the galleries that year and sent all of them a 30% off code for prints, good only for Friday & Saturday.
All day Friday & Saturday, I watched the print orders roll in! It was unreal!
These were print orders I would have otherwise never received!
I then did a 25% off Cyber Monday say as a follow-up in case they missed it over the weekend.
I sold thousands of dollars of prints that weekend – which was admittedly a little crazy to have to deal with fulfilling all those orders with going in to Christmas – but a lovely blessing of extra cash!
I Haven’t Planned Out my Black Friday Sale?!Thanksgiving and Black Friday are just around the corner. I get it. So you might be stressed that you haven’t planned out your sale. Did you notice that I thought of AND kicked off my sale at about 11pm on Thanksgiving night? I decided I was going to do that sale about 10 minutes before I started emailing people. I just had to set up the coupon code first!
It is not too late!
Awesome, but I Don’t Do Online Sales of PrintsI get it. With the majority of my photography clients for the past three years being boudoir clients, and my concern for their privacy online, I’ve gone in to security lockdown mode and only offer In Person Sales for those clients. I would have to think of other ideas for them.
If you have past portrait or wedding photography clients who did an in person sales session, you could set up an online gallery for them and offer them a chance to come back and order extra prints. Maybe they want gifts for the family that they had not thought of at the time of their original ordering session? Maybe they would still like some holiday cards, or 4×6 prints to include in their cards?
I’m planning this year to go back to all of my boudoir clients from this year and offer any that didn’t purchase the digital file add-on the chance to do so. I’ll take a percentage off the price. They didn’t buy them the first time round, but since I have the USB drives and the files already – it is money I would not have made otherwise!

Other Black Friday Sales IdeasLooking for some other inspiring ideas for Black Friday Sales for your photography clients? My friend Jamie at The Modern Tog has a blog post full of ideas on how to run a successful Black Friday Sale, so be sure to check it out and see if it might spark other ideas for you! Think about what will be the best fit for your business, and what you can pull off in the time that you have, and make some extra cash for the end of the year!