We are getting some hits for senior picture sessions. I was wondering whats the going rate on senior sessions in your area and what do you include? I know I have seen posts before the great crash going anywhere from $50 to $1000. We typically price almost all of our sessions in the $200 range, include a slideshow, a print credit, and online ordering. Prints are a'la cart with no particular print package.

What are you guys finding works in your area when you are dealing with "the lifetouches of the world" as the typical senior portrait provider for most schools and yearbooks? We are also finding some schools charge a "year book insertion fee" for pictures not taken by lifetouch, and some schools wont take any images for the yearbook unless they are in traditional graduation garb.

Thanks for any input.

In my area none of the schools have contracts for senior portraits (that I know of). Pretty much every senior uses a local photographer or the local chain studio for their senior portraits; I don't think it would fly well here if the schools charged extra for non-official photographers. Having been a senior only ten years ago, I was aghast when I heard of the practice of schools contracting with one photographer for senior portraits or requiring them to look the same with everyone in their graduation gowns. On the flip side, our school had a big fight (I'd say broohaha, but I don't know how to spell it! ) the year I was on the yearbook staff when one girl's yearbook portrait included her baby daughter.

I'm still new, so I'm probably still a bit cheap; my session fee is only $30, and I don't have a minimum. My print prices aren't really inexpensive, though - my last senior session (okay, my only senior session at my current price - I don't have many customers yet) ended up at $445 including a second order, and didn't do any framing. My prices are also a 'la carte, unless doing framing.

I've thought about doing a minimum order and including a print credit; I might implement it at the end of this year.

I'm really not sure of the going rate in my area - I'm probably on the low end.

Aaron, thanks for the info! Here in Atlanta, the contracted school picture companies rule, so the seniors market is for those that truely want something different than what they get in the posed indoor portrait shoot packages. Thanks, and good luck with your business!

Anybody else?

We have two senior sessions, one is $49 the other is $75. The $75 one is up to an hour and a half and includes indoor and outdoor photos. Pretty much everyone purchases that one. All prints are additional. We don't do packages, but most photographers in our area do. This actually sets us apart from them. Our session fee is pretty similar to others in our area.

Thanks for the info Lynn! I dont particularly like packages either. I would much rather just give a print credit and let them pick pictures a'la carte with our regular print prices. We are beginning to think the $100 fee might be about where this needs to be.

Anybody else?

$350

-time & talent
-$200 credit
-proof book
-private online proofing & ordering

I've only used this (print credit) recently so I can't tell ya if it "works", but I think it makes it easy, and people wont procastinate about buying stuff. All portraits are priced this way. A big mistake that I've done in the past with seniors, is leaving theirs images online for too long, they WILL procrastinate. Give them 45 days or less. I like offering a proof book (6x9 soft cover lulu.com books) becasue 1.they are used like brag books and take them to school 2. they can still look and there is a better possibility of ordering more images after the website expires. Plus they are inexpensive.

Hi Mike,
The "Senior Session"
395.00
includes up to 4 hours, 3 locations, 5 outfit changes, an online slideshow,a DVD slideshow, an 11x14 for mom and dad, 8 = 4x5 portraits, 56 wallets. I like to give the client a folio for the 4x5's (it's not included, and sells for 38.00). They seem to love it!
Candy

hey mike...

we've been doing seniors as our "bread and butter" for 2 full years, and i worked at one of our areas better studios for 3 years before that. we have what we consider to be a pretty sweet system...goes like this.

$200 session fee. period. 2 hours, no print credit. session fee is due 2 days after the session is booked or the date remains open for another senior who may call and request that same date (date isn't as important as time since we'll sometimes shoot up to 3 or 4 seniors a day)....

that $200 session fee is changed for 1 day which is when we hold our 10-hour sale. we market to all of the local schools by selecting our TM's or "team members". TMs are the equivelant of "ambassadors" but we hate that term. each school (this year we have 10) has only 1 TM. the TM comes in early for a promo-session and we use those images to create and print 500 glossy business cards for them. they take those cards to school THE WEEK OF our 10-hour sale, promote the heck out of us passing cards to every person that breathes and having those people pass them out FOR THEM as well - and we book almost our entire year the day we have our sale that week.

the sale itself is for any senior. they must book in june, july or august. the sale price is $100 off BUT we split that up 2 ways for a reason. it breaks down to $50 off the session and a $50 credit toward prints which leaves them paying a session fee within 2 days of $150 bucks and basically just taking care of tax for them on their final orders.

the reason we want the extra $50 on the session fee is because a major part of the motivation for our TMs is that they get a fast $15 in cold cash for EVERY PERSON WHO BOOKS FROM THEIR SCHOOL DURING OUR SALE DAY. on top of that we have bonus levels up to 50 sessions per school where we add a few extra bucks on. if a senior manages to get the max 50 seniors from their school to call on the sale day - they get the $15/senior rate which is $750 plus that bonus level is $250 which caps them out at $1k just for taking cards to school and talking about us in the mean time. how much money they make is directly related to how hard they market for us.

on top of that perk, they also get free sessions for a year along with a print credit of 20x the number of seniors that booked on our sale day. so if they did max out at 50 seniors, that would be another $1000 in print credit for them. or if they got 22 people to call, they'd have $440 dollars in credit.

and then even further then that all of our TMs get custom made tshirts (thinking about doing that for every senior - not sure yet), gift cards to places like starbucks or itunes and all kinds of other fun stuff throughout the year. we HATE the ambassador programs most studios use...our TM program rocks because we care about the senior who is helping us and we act like it.

from a marketing standpoint though this system is awesome for us because our TMs totally LOVE our work. and as far as incentives go - we feel like we've done a good job setting it up so that the TM gets motivated BY THEMSELVES due to the quick cash and tons of print credit they'll make in NO time at all. they're only required to market for a week with the sale cards we print for them.

the key is that they want to get us work because that earns them money - they want to BE at TM in the first place because we care about them and show it.

at the end of the day we do fairly well with seniors. the average order this past year, NOT INCLUDING session fees, was about $900 and last year we did around 60 seniors total. second year that's not too shabby.

the kicker is that the first and second years our TM program was NOWHERE NEAR where it is now, and on top of that we'd only had between 2-4 TMs anyway. that's only marketing to 2-4 schools with a sub-par marketing strategy. we do no bilboards, no signs, no mall displays, no anything. we do almost all of our marketing through myspace and our TMs. our new website is also gonna kill (rockin' the blu) and we're moving into a huge studio space in the downtown area of our TINY town.

this year we anticipate 200 senior sessions to be booked by the end of december. as i mentioned before, in the past we'd only been able to get 2-4 TMs with a TOTALLY crappy program. this year we're doing 10 TMs, all of whom are awesome, with a far-exceptional program than past years.

so - i know that was kinda lengthy, and we haven't been saying much around here for a while, but it's because we've literally been buried in books and brainstorming and just working out the kinks in our business. finally, due to sowing and reaping and even more to God's increase...we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

hopefully that helps ya! good luck this year!

graceandpeace.
nate and brittany embrey.
+theshotshot.

*sorry for the threadjack*

Nate,

This concept is interesting to me.

How do you go about recruiting/selecting your team members?

Thanks!
Bentley

myspace baby.

we spend all year adding 15, 16 and 17 year old "friends". this acquaints them with out studio, our work and gives us the op to send out bulletins and event invites to everyone on our list. this year we made a little promotional peice, uploaded it and sent it out like 20 times within 2 days. at the end of our 2 days we had all 10 TMs. myspace also allows us to screen them a bit and make sure they're not into anything crazy and/or see how many friends they have in order to help us make the right desicions if we get more than 1 response per school - which we did.

i'll attatch the file here so you can see what it looked like. only thing - everyone can steal the ideas, just don't steal the design or the images...lol.

by the way...some of the sentances in this promo-piece don't even make sense...lol. i made this at 3am and had been pulling all nighters quite often.

ignore it. hahaha....

Very nice! Thanks so much!

Bentley

What month do you run your 10 hour sale?

Not a thread jack - you guys add all the info you want!

ahhh, it's a fellow ohioan! we view all photographers from ohio as friendly competition...lol...so we've checked out your stuff and seen your prices. you're being watched! hahaha...just kidding.

no, we're all about distributing our knowledge - we're happy to answer any questions any one has. we do have an person from a school in the columbus area (pickerington) who wants to be a TM so we're pretty excited about expanding that direction. like to maybe grab some potential peters or kent smith clients next year...lol. that would mainly be a confidence booster though more than anything.

when we do our sale actually varies. in this area (zanesville, about 35k people) we have like 12 photography studios. only what we consider to be the top 2 studios also have a 10-hour sale like us so getting the jump on them is always a good idea. the past 2 years we've had our sale in may - this year however we're having it in april. we MIGHT have a second sale in may to clean up a few clients who may have missed the initial sale and wished they could have gotten in, but that sale will probably just be for $50 off the session fee and no print credit.

we've been having seniors call since september paying full price session fees and getting no print credit and we're happy about that. the first few years we felt like we were being mean if we didn't extend the sale to ALL who called even if they were late but we realized we were just showing ourslelves to be weak by doing so. we were de-valuing our product. that's really caused people to perk their ears up a little when we mention a sale now. also we typically advertise that we will be accepting a limited number of seniors ON OUR SALE DAY. we advertise through our TMs that we'll be shutting down the lines after 200 seniors unless otherwise decided. this has caused a pretty decent frenzy of calls the years we've tried that.

giving our sale cards to our TMs to be passed out at school THE WEEK OF the sale along with the hype of having to call in "early to reserve a spot" as well as treating our TMs so good really makes for a positive return on our very small investment. just from senior sessions - on that one sale day we can make close to 20k (if we sold 150 sessions)...and then we have all the orders to look forward to as well. it's so exciting. and to think that 3 years ago i wrote gary fong an email pleading with him to give me money so we could start this business up. lol. he was very gracious with advice even though he (thankfully) turned us down.

anyway...that should be it. i also wanted to mention that our senior sessions include everything each senior could want. we DO NOT charge extra for ANYTHING unless we have to travel like...super far. our sessions include unlimted poses, unlimited outfits, unlimited friends and family and unlimited locations. this way the session REALLY IS the seniors and they don't feel like we're stifling them or trying to rip them off by making them pay more for like, bringing a dog or wanting to go downtown. we always tell our customers that "if you want to bring 45 outfits, go for it, as long as you can change fast and you don't mind 2 pictures in each then we're good to go!". lol...you get the point.

so hopefully that answers your question. if we start hearing about squier photography stealing our clients here in ztown we're gonna have to have a sit-down chat...hahahahahaha.

and when are we gonna get a columbus PUG going too? that's been bothering me.

see you guys later!

I'm from Ohio toooooo!


But I left long ago and now live in California, so I'm not yer competition. Grew up between Millersburg & Mount Vernon, so our high school battled Zanesville in football and such. Funny small world this is, eh?

But my question (as someone who is just knocking on the door of senior portraiture in an area that doesn't really have a huge market yet) is how do you actually pick your reps? I would think that the right person would make a huge difference in the response. Everyone wants to be like the cool kids, ya know. How do you screen the kids who are interested? Do you meet with them and their parents? How's it all go?

Hey Nate. I was actually going to call you about that. I saw your 740 number and I thought you might not want to tell us your secrets. I'm glad you're cool with it. We really should get together sometime. Maybe in Pickerington or Rynoldsburg. I thought that a few years ago on DPN, too, but never got around to it.

Anyway, about taking from Peters and Kent -- don't think it's out of the question. We had a lot of seniors this year whose older siblings went to one of them (and Finocci, too). They do great work, but we compete on a different level. We do things differently. Similar to what you're doing, too, oddly enough.

We've been talking about your last post all day. And I tried finding your Web site but it's proven difficult. (I know, you're about to release a new one).

And Sarah, about finding the right ambassadors (or whatever), often the best ones are the ones whose mothers are "connectors" -- you know, the people who know everyone at school, are involved with everything. The kids are good, too, but we've had more luck with the moms.

Speaking of a small world, we used to live in Santa Barbara -- had a lot of friends at Cal Poly. I remember many a night driving home from SLO over the pass with the door open so I could see the line on the road because of the fog. The things we do when we're young and stupid.

sorry guys...been ULTRA busy with the new site and getting it launched. let me touch on a few things...

sara:

as far as our selection process goes. no - we absolutely DO NOT meet with parents, yuck! lol. i understand what adam was saying about the parents that are super involved helping out tremendously...but with our approach, everything revolves around the excitement of the senior themselves as they plaster their schools with our sale cards (they're currently juniors but you get the picture).

we believe that there's a major shift that's been happening as of late in the senior photography world. formerly the parents made the decision where their kids were going to be having their pictures taken, and the kids went. our goal was to create pictures that were so different, fun and desirable that the kids wouldn't accept anything other than what they wanted. the parents are paying - and we realize that so we take a few "safe" shots. but for the most part, the kids want us...and they get us. if and when we achieve that, we're golden because not only are the parents buying "what they like" but they're also buying their kid a whole separate group of images that "they like" at their order appointment.

since EVERYTHING about our system revolves around the senior repping for us and that one single week when they cover their school with our sale cards - we don't care much about the parents. lol. all that matters to us is that we find ourselves TMs that have lots of friends, talk a lot and who love our work. like we said earlier...it's alllllllllll done through myspace. we promote the need for TMs, juniors respond, and from there we can see what they're into, how many friends they have, what they like, whether or not they leave lots of comments, etc. not to mention they all have tons of pictures of themselves listed (we give away free low-res myspace files to our seniors that have a watermark that says "theshotshot hooked me up" on them).

again, hooking the kids who's parents have a lot of influence is a great method...my former employer tried that all the time. we're skipping that step and going right for the jugular by sending a +shotshot evangelist right into the heart of the market we're aiming for. this method causes more buzz than any other we've ever seen. we're so thankful that God gave us these ideas - cuz they just plain work.

adam:

about sharing our secrets...lol. they are secrets, but only as long as someone doesn't ask us about them. it's been hard but one thing i've learned from dj in reading his blog and a lot of the books he recommends is that you HAVE TO SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE. i'm learning a lot about the law of sowing and reaping and this principle fits so perfectly into it it's insane. we feel like, even though we're young and have only been in business a few years - we still have much to share, and the best way to show our appreciation for others helping us, is to help even more people by passing on what we know to them. it's also been interesting to watch how relaying an idea to others in writing really solidifies it for myself and even helps me understand it better than i thought i did. it's totally awesome!

and about dpn...lol. i'm sorry to hear that you used to visit that forum (or maybe still do, yikes!)...hahaha. i'm probably even mores sorry that you had to listen to me pipe up a few times and try to get a few select people to stop whining their heads off about everything, especially newbie youngn's like myself and my wife. i was about ready to e-strangle someone. hahahaha....but yeah, osp KILLS that forum and we're so glad to be here and learn from so many awesome artists.

ever wanna get together let me know. we'll shoot you a pm with our new address as soon as the site's up. right now you can just google us and about 13 trillion sites come up for you to browse...lol. "shotshot photography" pulls at least a page and a half of results. but remember, those are relatively - uhhhh, not updated.

hopefully that answers some questions.

thanks guys.
graceandpeace.

nate.

Oh my gosh. You all are my heros. Thank you soooo much for all of your knowledge. My husband is a teacher and so because he has the summer's off we want to really try to get ahead during this summer with senior pics. Your posts have helped me sooo much and I so much appreciate that. If you don't mind I have a few more questions.

1. Is the promo peice that you put up on my space and the one that the TMs hand out the same? If not what do the one's they hand out say and how big are they?

2. Do you have any tips about pricing products and packages? We need to make at least $400 on each senior. How can we make sure we average that?

Thank you sooooo much!!!!!! -Ashley and Sam

this is such great marketing. WOuld you mind showing us an example of the cards you have the TMs pass out? Our schools here send out a large packet with every photographers brochures. I want mine to be different and i really like the idea of just marketing a few schools. So love that and thats basically what i am doing now. Back when i graduated the picked a few kids from each school and we got 10 off per kid, but really nothing else. I liked this idea but wanted more. SO a big thank you! great advice. Only thing is my sessions are only 49 & 69 any advice on that situation???

thanks so much

julie b

any update on your program to share? What were the results this senior season?

For my studio I have found 2 keys to getting high averages (1K+).

1) Plenty of images to choose from. I show my seniors 50-100 images to choose from. This isn't 6 images in the same pose, each image should be unique.

2) Packages that let them use those images. Mine include an album (wire bound 5x7 proof book), wallets, 8 gift prints and a wall portrait. This leads to a min package order of almost $800, with most being around $1200.

I just spend like 15 minutes reading through that....holy crap inspiring....makes me think...hmmm.....I am in good with my home town high school....and we just so happen to moving back next week....

Here's something I've worked out that works very well for me. While I don't push the whole ambassador program or as I like to call it "senior rep" program I do marketing that's proven well for me. It's really nothing new but like I said it works.

Each school year I design a 5x8 post card double sided with a discount and some pictures on it, and hand them out to various schools. I change the design up for every quarter usually to keep it fresh. Some schools it works and others it doesn't. A lot of the time I'm hitting schools up with no photographer's in their local area (hard to believe I know) but this is North Louisiana and there are hundreds of small cities with big high schools and only uncle bob to do senior portraits. This tends to work well because once I book one or two word of mouth spreads through the rest of the school like a virus.

The only problem I've found is that it doesn't work for bigger cities with more than 1 high school. Those schools don't even bother passing out my cards most of the time, I know because of my site statistics. When the cards have been handed out I can check out google analytics and see what areas I'm getting hits from. Sometimes I get none where I drop off 200 cards at, which lets me know that they never got handed out. Sometimes I just go too far out and it's not worth the students to drive, even if they don't have a local photographer.

I started my Senior Rep program just a couple of months ago and while I've had a couple of inquiries I couldn't bait anyone into doing it. I'm pretty sure it's because I REQUIRE them to refer me at least 1 senior before I'll release their proofs into the online system. I do give them senior rep cards like your business cards, but am I just being unreasonable? There are plenty of people around here that would take advantage of getting a free session.

There's plenty of incentive for booking seniors. I have a reward system that gives gift cards, and apple products (like ipods) the more they book. They also automatically get senior discounts as well. I'm also only one of two out of at least 20 photographers in my area that do a senior rep program at all so this information definitely helps me think that I need to try harder for my own program to work.