February 16th,
2006
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New Product News
by Dana
Hill
Subwallets in PPS Market
For those of you shooting schools, you will be interested
in knowing that subwallets are now available in the PPS
market of QP2. The subwallets are offered either as 8
images on a 5x7 sheet ($1.60) or 16 images on an 8x10
($3.19). Each image size is 1.75 x 2.5. Traditionally,
this has been a popular product offering in the school
market.
Large Plaques Are Now A Customizable Product In The
Race Market
The large race plaque (lab price - $17.54 ) can now be
customized with your own artwork. This plaque holds an
8x10 image. You now have the ability to customize
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the artwork appearing on the right hand side of the plaque.
This automated process requires knowledge of PhotoShop.
For details and training on designing your template for
this product, call Darren Hanson in Support x456.
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New Male Gymnastics Sports Modifier
Now available is a male gymnastics sports modifier. The
artwork is more suitable for male events and was developed
based on customer suggestion.
Coming Soon To Sports – League Logos on Memory
Mates!!!
Starting Friday, February 24th, you will have the ability
to put a league logo on Style 1 and Style 3 Sport Memory
Mates! This has been an often requested product and we
are excited to offer you this option. This should be a
strong booking tool in obtaining league business. Keep
in mind that you could also choose to put a mascot image
or other relevant symbol on the memory mate to change
up your product year to year. Contact the Support Department
for details on logo specs and upload procedure.
Collage Success Story
When Scott Happel, of
Happel
Photography, sat in on the Greek breakout at the Las
Vegas seminar and saw the new product presentation on
collages, he immediately thought about his band competitions.
He felt confident that this product would be well-received
with this group. From his preliminary results, it sure
seems like that is the case.
Because Scott normally sells 5x7’s to this market
for $15, he felt that an 8x10 collage for $40 would offer
a great value to his customers. At these high end events,
he typically would sell between 1 and 2 5x7’s per
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customer. With 4 to 6 shots taken of each subject, the
collage offered a cost effective way for those customers
to get a print with all of their images at a cost cheaper
than buying them individually. The $40 price tag does
not scare off these customers relative to his other price
points. In fact, he is considering offering the 8x10 collage
product for $50 at the national level competitions.
An interesting point is the combinations of images on
the collages sold. Half of the collages contain all action
shots and the other half are a mix of action and posed
images. Many times, a collage would include 3-4 images
of the subject along with 1or 2 images of friends. Most
likely, the customer would not have purchased a 5x7 of
that friend but including their image in their collage
provided a way to do this.
We encourage all of you to think outside the box in regards
to collages. While initially presented as a Greek product,
Scott has proven the interest is broader. Review the types
of events you photograph and identify some that would
be good candidates for offering the collage. Position
the collage as not only a great custom product, but a
great value as well. Look for a follow-up story on Scott’s
results in the next newsletter. Thanks, Scott, for sharing
your collage success story.
Sports Forms Designs: Your
Ticket To Sales and Profits!
By Brian
Speers
Lately, as I drive to work each day, I’ve noticed
a large number of small signs growing like weeds on nearly
every corner on every intersection. Along with the “Work
from Home” and “Lose 10 pounds in 10 Days”
signs that are everywhere, there are a growing number
of signs announcing league sign-ups for youth sports.
This—naturally—means that spring sports are
just around the corner!
If you’ve been a player in the youth sports market
for some time now, or, if you are new to this lucrative
market it may be time to look at your order form/envelope
and determine offers, pricing, and design. If you are
using a pre-pay system, which is the general rule of thumb
in the 4-12 age group for sports, your sports order envelope
is your first class ticket to sales, profits, and parent
participation.
A poorly designed order form will frustrate and confuse
while a properly designed order form can create interest
and—ultimately—strong revenues. Before even
thinking of your design start a collection of order forms
that you get in the mail and see in the newspaper on a
daily basis. When you see a few that you like try to understand
why you like it. What appeals to you and what doesn’t?
Keep in mind that a well-designed form meets both the
user’s needs as well as your own.
Forms cannot be created in a vacuum. Once you have fashioned
a form that is ready to be tested pass it around the office
for evaluation, typos, grammar, and clarity. Once you’ve
made your adjustments give it to several people outside
the industry to see if they find it easy to follow and
understand. Listen to what they say! Their comments could
both save a potential disaster, and put money in your
pocket.
If you’ve ever designed a form—any kind of
form—you know that the fine-tuning, modifications,
and changes can be never-ending. The desire to tweak and
refine just to create the perfect form can be a lifelong
pursuit. But at some point you have to stop, get the completed
form printed and into the hands of your customers.
Two different sports order form templates that are used
at our two local retail photo companies are attached to
this article. Each of these templates (
template
01 and
template
02) was designed in Microsoft Word and should be relatively
easy for you to alter to your preferences, your pricing,
your packages and your company.
Within a week we’ll be sending out an additional
template for the new sports envelopes that are two inches
longer! New templates will also include a retouching option
for those CCS customers that will be offering retouching
to their sports offers.
Fast Proofing
Impacts Winter Grads
By Brad
Hurley
This past grad season, Candid
Color Photography diligently pursued all of the recommended
best practices in the grad market, and the results speak
for themselves.
Sales are up by 47%, with no increase in the number
of graduates shot.
The largest contributing factor to their success was delivering
proofs, both printed and emailed, within 24 hours.
Staff was scheduled to work later in the day, and some
evenings to be able to ID the grads as soon they were
over. No additional staff was needed.
Obviously, email collection played an important roll in
achieving the 24 hour delivery goal with proofs. A
focused effort on collecting multiple emails
for every graduate allowed them to significantly improve
the number of emails collected. CCP was able to collect
at least one email for 59% of graduates, and two or more
emails for 16% of graduates, an increase of 18% over the
previous year. Email collection is an area that they feel
they still have room for improvement, and are planning
on sending a staff member dedicated to collecting emails
to their larger grad events in the future. The number
of images shot also had a positive impact, as all of the
grads were double shot or triple shot.
All of these factors contributed to a 52% increase in
the total number of orders received, with 73% of all orders
transacted online, a 23% increase over the previous year.
By driving more customers to the web, the number of manual
orders was reduced by 16%, which contributed to a reduction
in labor. The number of grads ordering increased to 41%,
an increase of 14% compared to last year. The average
dollars per graduate shot increased by $7.00, a 47% increase.
Candid Color Photography followed the procedures of other
successful grad photographers, and saw immediate results.
By taking the very concrete suggestions from Bob
Knight Photography from the last several seminars,
they had similar success.
The ball is in your court – you can adopt these
best practices and realize the same results this grad
season.
Why are you still using QP2 over
QP Plus in the QuicPics market?
By Blake
Whitney
 |
For the week 2/5/06 – 2/11/06, events on QP Plus
generated nearly twice as many orders as events on QP2.
QP Plus also had 32% more visits than QP2 and converted
new sessions into orders at a rate 20% higher than QP2.
Orders per session on QP2 were 3.49% as compared to 4.32%
on QP Plus. During this time, there were fewer active
events and fewer events being activated on QP Plus. Even
though this is a snapshot of a week’s activity,
we think it is representative of the benefits of QP Plus
over QP2 for the QuicPics market.
We feel that QP Plus has a superior customer interface
that leads to fewer page views for the retail customer.
The new enlargement window also allows customers to view
a preview without adding an image to their favorites list,
making it even more user friendly. With the addition of
the end customer controlled Zoom/Crop and custom Collage
product, QP Plus now has a superior product offering as
well.
The reasons to switch seem to be clear to us, but we may
be missing something. If there is a particular reason
why you haven’t made the switch to QP Plus, please
let us know. If there is a functionality issue or QP Plus
isn’t meeting a particular need, please make us
aware so we can correct it.
Get a FREE sample Collage!
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Send me an email
with your name and account number and I will send you
a gift certificate code for a free 8x10 Collage. Limit
one per account.
A sample event has been created for the new QP Plus Collage
product so you can experience how easy it is for customers
to create and customize this exciting new product. Now
your customers can create their own multi-image prints
with a variety of backgrounds and templates.
Once you have created and received your new collage, we
hope you will agree that this new product would be a welcome
addition to your product offering.
New A/R Adjustment Report
By Jeff
Hudson, CCS Controller
We are now able to e-mail each day a detail of a/r adjustments
posted to the lab account. The report will list freight
charges, lab account payments, and other types of a/r
adjustment transactions. Transactions will be sub-totaled
by transaction type and each sub-total will appear on
both the weekly and monthly lab account statement.
As an example, all Freight charges will be grouped together
and sub-totaled. The Freight subtotal for each day will
appear on that week’s lab account statement as
well as on the monthly statement. The system-generated
e-mail will read ‘A/R Adjustments for’ and
the date. The e-mailed reports will begin Friday, February
17.
If you have questions please contact Joseph
Nicholson or Jeff
Hudson
Developments
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