There are plenty of online retailers out there, worrying whether they’ll still be here this time next year.

At this time of year, with the next few weeks due to deliver a significant proportion of annual turnover, the pressure is never greater to squeeze that extra pound out of your customers.  Merchants up and down the country are burning the midnight oil to fine tune the promotional plan in the hope that Christmas profits will sustain their business through another year.

But how many merchants find themselves accidentally training their customers to expect a juicy offer before they’ll place an order?  How many are struggling for ways to avoid having to settle for reduced-margin sales.  For many, it can feel like the dreaded discount death spiral.

Even at this late hour, there are dials you can tweak to avoid giving away your Christmas profits in the way of reduced margins.  Turning down the discounts dial is just one thing you can do.  There are dials you can turn up too – even now, when it really matters – dials that can result in more profits (more cash!) without increasing your planned order volumes.

I’m a bit of an evangelist for niche retailers adopting a discount-free marketing strategy.  And so is my colleague, Patrick Pitman, in Austin, TX.  He’s just put together a four week crash course that’ll give you creative, constructive guidance on what to do instead of pitching endless discount codes to your customers.

I recommend you check it out at Zero Percent Off!  The course consists of a series of 20 minute audio lessons with worksheets.  It’s priced at US$197 but you can actually pay what you like.  How’s that for an offer

Don’t miss out on the biggest online shopping days of the year.

Christmas is a huge milestone in the calendar of a catalogue retailer.  After months of military-style planning, your promotional campaigns are in full swing and your well-oiled fulfilment operation purrs effortlessly as it shifts into a higher gear.  Not long to go now!

As you ride the festive wave and count down the days to the holiday, you’d be forgiven for looking forward to spending some time out of the office and forgetting about business for a few days.  But will your business keep on working for you over the Christmas shut-down, even if your staff are at home enjoying their mince pies?

The fact is, you can’t afford to neglect the busiest online shopping days in the entire year.  In 2009, like the year before, Boxing Day was the busiest day for online shopping.  The next day, the 27th, was the second busiest day.  Online sales on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were up 36% on the previous year.  Although YOU might be ready for a break, your customer has different ideas!  They have gift money and vouchers to spend, and new gadgets to shop with.  And more than anything – they’re hungry for some bargains.

Last year, John Lewis began its online clearance at 6pm on Christmas Eve and reported an increase of 23 per cent in sales for the first three days of its online sale, compared to the same period last year.  On Christmas Day, their website took an order every ten seconds on average – the peak shopping hours being between 9pm and 10pm.

Have you planned to take advantage of this opportunity?  If you’re looking no further than the Christmas postage deadlines, there’s a good chance you’ll miss out.  Here’s a checklist of actions you should be thinking about now.

1. Have your site update ready to roll out on Christmas Eve.
Time to clear away the tinsel on the header, ditch the last posting dates, and re-organise your featured categories and products.  Your customers are ready to change gear, and it’s your job to make the site relevant to their changed requirements.

2. Set expectations for customer service.
Your customer service team is likely to be depleted or absent altogether over the holiday period.  Make sure your customers know when to expect their purchases, and when they can expect to get an answer to their queries.

3. Make sure all your gift voucher recipients can redeem their vouchers online
There’s nothing worse than having a gift voucher and not being able to spend it online.  It’s a bugbear of mine – and surprisingly common.  If your system can’t handle it, it’s time you did something about it.

4. Use your social media channels to build the hype.
Build a dialogue of engagement with your followers and use it to remind them about you during the holiday period.  Use scheduling functionality to maintain the dialogue, even when you’re at home enjoying your Christmas lunch.

5. Launch your sale.
There’s no better time to create some empty space on the shelves and turn those slow-moving lines into cash.  If you run just one clearance sale a year, make sure you launch it over the Christmas holiday rather than waiting until January.

6. Land an email in your customer’s inbox on Christmas Day.
Come on, you’d be mad not to.  Whether it’s Christmas Day or Boxing Day, let your customers know you are open for business!  If you don’t, someone else certainly will.

The Autumn 2010 Joules catalogue has been lying around in our house for over a week now.  It’s moved from the doormat to the kitchen to the coffee table to the catalogue pile. The trouble is, it’s still in its polywrap.  Unopened.

In my household, this is a bit of a mystery.  We’re mail order enthusiasts and all three women (daughters 16 & 19, and, erm, 40-ish other half) are hawk-eyed fashionistas.  So why has it failed to do it’s job of grabbing the reader’s attention and luring them inside?

My observed theory has two parts.  Firstly, it’s not obviously a Joules catalogue.  The clothes that the model is wearing, lovely though they may be, are not recognisably Joules.  We know the Joules signature stuff when we see it – and this isn’t it.  And as for the logo?  It’s so subtle that you’re pretty likely to miss it completely at a quick glance, given the other headlines and calls to action that feature prominently on the cover.  I think this is a missed opportunity.  Perhaps it’s a deliberate ‘trojan horse’ tactic to get the reader inside without knowing it’s Joules – in an effort to reach a wider audience.  Even so, I can’t help feeling that the value of brand recognition and customer loyalty is being ignored.

Secondly, there’s the matter of this word ‘catazine’.  Let’s face it, it’s not a word that’s bandied around much outside direct marketing circles.  It’s jargon – not common parlance.  I don’t understand the need to use it at all.  After all, when you visit Joules online you don’t see the word ‘website’ as a massive headline at the top of the homepage.  Customers are smart enough to know what they’re getting without being hit over the head with it.  Good content in a catalogue enriches the customer experience and helps reinforce brand positioning and differentiation.  I’m all for it.  But the catazine word is unnecessary – especially when it’s at the expense of branding.  In my household at least, it was clear turn-off.

Now – recent reports indicate that Joules is doing phenomenally well – so clearly they know what they are doing.  All I would say to them is this: you’ve got a strong brand and a good story to tell so don’t hide it – shout about it.

There’s no doubt that the web continues to evolve into an increasingly visual medium. Consumers like pictures, and they like video even more. So – as the technology continues to evolve at warp speed – maybe now’s the time for small business to sit up and pay attention?

Video has the power to showcase products and build brand awareness in a unique and compelling way. By engaging, educating and entertaining visitors, the niche retailer has the opportunity to connect with their customer in a way that cultivates loyalty and encourages ‘social dissemination’ of the brand. It’s no surprise to learn that video is the most ‘shared’ content type on the web.

“Isn’t that all a bit fluffy?” I hear the cynics cry. Well, maybe – but it’s only the start. Consider the importance that Google now attributes to video and you’ve got an altogether more measurable incentive to rethink your strategy.

Since the roll-out of the Google “Caffeine” upgrade earlier this year, the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) are increasingly dominated by real-time and video results – part of Google’s mission to deliver fresher, richer results. Video in particular, seems to get preferential treatment (unsurprising, given that Google owns YouTube). Not only do video results now capture some of the prime real estate in the list of organic results, but the new left nav column provides advanced search options on video results that reflect their enhanced status.

Video for ecommerce

As well as generating qualified traffic for your website (more on video SEO below), you can employ video effectively to increase conversion in the following ways:

1. Product demonstrations. The next best thing to seeing the product in “real life”, a video gives a visitor the opportunity to see its features in action, and provide some human scale. It’s an opportunity to assert your ‘authority’ as an expert and build consumer confidence.

2. Brand building. No matter how carefully you’ve crafted the copy on your About Us page to skillfully convey the uniqueness of your product or service, and your company values, relatively few people will read it. By providing supplemental video you can engage those unwilling to read the blurb, and do it in a way that makes it easy for them to share it with their friends.

3. Customer service. Whether it’s to provide answers to frequently asked questions, share customer testimonials, provide instructions, or simply put a human face to your operation – customer service video can help break down resistance and smooth the visitor’s path to purchase.

What makes a good video?

OK, so it all sounds quite good in principle and you’ve probably got some ideas on what to do. Here’s the conventional wisdom on what makes a good video for an ecommerce site:

1. Keep it short. The first 15 seconds are critical – so save your best for first. Three or four minutes is a good length as a rule, but note how Google enables you to search for videos of different length. No doubt there’s a trade-off opportunity in terms of competition and ranking.
2. Make it relevant. Treat your customers (and Google) with respect. Unless your video can educate, engage or entertain – you’re probably best thinking of a better idea.
3. Make it SEO smart. Like the rest of your content, you need to optimise it for organic search. I explain this in more detail below.
4. Shoot it in HD. It’s just a hunch, but I think HD will rank probably rank better than not. Google presents you with the option to filter out HD videos, and I think that’s a pretty good indication of its preference.

What makes a video good enough?

This is perhaps the biggest psychological barrier that small businesses face when considering video. Does my video need to be professionally produced, or is it something we can do inexpensively in-house? Do my customers expect slick production standards, or is ‘basic’ acceptable?

With a Flip camera or iPhone 4 you can quickly and easily capture decent HD video. All the software you need to add the bells and whistles is readily and cheaply available to download. If you do any of your own product photography, you probably already have most of what you need, and someone who understands how to do it. That’s one end of the scale.

Although no-one wants to damage their brand with unprofessional content, ask yourself what’s good enough for the purpose you’re seeking to fulfil. We live in the YouTube age where consumers accept clips with a wide variety of production standards – ranging from zero to Hollywood. With a steady camera, decent lighting, and a reasonable quality voiceover – you can, for example, produce a perfectly respectable product video. When you need something more professional, you may be pleasantly surprised with the cost that you can negotiate with a specialist.

The SEO factor

Optimising your video for SEO is really no different to optimising any of your other content. Here’s a checklist for making sure your video appears in Google’s blended search results:

1. Start with your keywords. Before you even start making your video, choose two or three keywords maximum on which to base your content. Make sure you use these keywords in the video title, tags, description and any back-links you create to the video.
2. Lead with the product. If it’s a product video, make sure the first few frames feature a shot of your product, as YouTube will use this as a static image for your video.
3. Post on YouTube. Google owns YouTube, so you can bet that it’s well indexed. Create your own YouTube channel and include links back to your site in the description for each video (use a URL shortener). Organise your content, customise your channel, work your tags, and manage your comments in a pro-active way.
4. Add a transcript and subtitles. It’s definitely worth getting to grips with the new closed caption feature in YouTube, given that subtitles and transcripts are translated into other languages – and indexed in all of them.
5. Create inbound links to your video. As with other content, it’ll rank better when other sites are linking to it – especially if those links include the relevant keywords. Start by linking from your blog, your Facebook page and your Twitter feed. Book-marking your video with social book-marking sites like Digg, Stumble and Delicious will help others find your video and create their own links to it.
6. Participate and promote. Engage the YouTube community by using the Like, Comment, and Favourite features on other people’s videos. Promote your own videos across your other channels, even your catalogue, your delivery notes, your customer service emails.
7. Analyse. Start with YouTube’s built-in Insight reports – especially the “Discovery” data that tells you how viewers found your video. Then use Google analytics to generate more sophisticated reporting on the performance of your YouTube channel, and the conversion rate of the visitors it sends to your ecommerce site.

Ready to have a go?

An increase in qualified traffic and conversion rates is a powerful incentive – so how do you get started?

Perhaps you already have a social media champion or other marketing staffer who can drive a test project forward. Why not take advantage of a forthcoming photo shoot, a trip to a supplier, or a gathering of customers? The team members in a small business invariably have a rich resource of material and ideas between them. Your suppliers may even already have video content that could be repurposed.

So why not take your top ten keywords from your latest keyword research and brainstorm video ideas based on those words alone. Choose one, make it happen, and start measuring. As they say in the movies, the rest will be history.

Case study: Teaching a close shave drives qualified traffic

Robert Johnston, owner of my local barbershop and shaving emporium The Gentleman’s Shop, decided to make a short video called “How to get a great shave every morning”. It’s six minutes long and cost £1,000 (and a free shaving set) to have it professionally produced.

Since posting it in September last year, it’s been viewed over 26,000 times. Over 75% of those views are from people who found the video through the YouTube – in other words, people who’ve probably never heard of the Gentleman’s Shop. That’s a lot of qualified traffic – qualified by the store’s most important keywords – that is getting delivered to the site. And the video will continue to deliver traffic for weeks, months, and quite probably years to come as people continue to discover, discuss and share it.

Article licensed for publication with Creative Commons “Attribution” terms.

First published in Catalogue & e-Business Magazine, September 2010

How a retailer of adventure luggage attracts high-converting traffic with search-friendly content (and has a lot of fun in the process)

When I met him in June at the Internet Retailer conference in Boston, he’d just spent a week on a 500-mile off-road expedition putting a brand new Land Rover LR3 through its paces in Colorado, courtesy of Land Rover Lifestyle magazine.  By the time you read this, he’ll have just arrived back from a three-week expedition to a remote corner of Namibia.  All this, while running a successful and growing retail brand back home in Montana.  How does he get away with it?  Well, put simply, Jim’s business is Adventure.Like his father before him, Jim Markell was a parachute rigger in the marines.  Day in, day out, paratroopers quite literally put their lives in his hands every time they jumped out of a plane.   Today, he applies the same perfectionist’s appreciation of quality materials and attention to detail to manufacturing and retailing the Red Oxx range of premium adventure luggage.  Needless to say, every piece has an unconditional lifetime guarantee.

Building a content-rich landscape

I was already a fan of his product range thanks to an introduction from a colleague in the US, but now I’m an admirer of his marketing strategy too.  Why? Because Red Oxx uses content not only as the cornerstone of a successful, long-term, sustainable search strategy, but it positions this content at the heart of a wider marketing strategy in a manner that leverages its effectiveness exponentially. More on this “holistic” approach later, but first a summary of the tactic.

Over several years, Red Oxx has been publishing informative articles of around 800 words, framed around particular keyword phrases developed using tools such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery.  Importantly, the focus is deliberately on longer keyword phrases of three or four words, thus avoiding the most popular and competitive phrases.  They’ve found that the fourth word in a keyword phrase can add the extra degree of specificity that results in significantly higher click-through and conversion rates.

For example, when the airlines changed the rules for carry-on luggage post 9/11, there was a surge of interest in the subject from travellers worldwide.  It was also a subject of particular interest to Red Oxx, who make a range of bags based around these regulations.  Keywords phrases were researched and informational content was crafted, generating a surge of traffic to the site and a very short payback on the effort employed.  So successful was this particular campaign that it still generates top 10 organic rankings for certain keyword phrases and a steady stream of high-converting traffic more than six years later.

Swimming with sharks as a marketing strategy?

Where the example above was a somewhat opportunistic tactic straight out of the guerilla-marketing handbook, the next example epitomizes a slow burn and sustainable content strategy that has become the mainstay of the Red Oxx approach to generating qualified traffic from search.    It’s based simply on understanding their customers – what sort of people they are, and perhaps more importantly, what sort of people would they like to be.  By tapping into these aspirations with content that allows the merchant to interweave their brand and product, there is an opportunity to create the content-rich landscape that the search engine robots really appreciate.
Take swimming with sharks.  Hammerhead sharks to be specific – on Cocos Island, 300 miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.  Yes, it really exists (I spent five eventful days there once, but that’s another story), and it’s one of the world’s top Scuba destinations where you’re guaranteed to see more varieties of shark in greater quantities than you might previously have thought advisable or even possible.

So Jim and his cousin Shawn took a trip there a couple of years ago with a company specializing in live-aboard diving trips.  They came home with some nice pictures, a bit of video, and enough words to create a series of four 800 word articles for the Adventure Journals section of the Red Oxx website.  Of course, no detail is spared when it comes to describing the choice of kit bags to take along for the ride – but the content is nevertheless compelling: detailed, well written, keyword rich, and supported by some visually appealing pictures and video.

The articles were all written in-house, and then optimized for search by an agency at a cost of around £250 each.  The cost of adding the supporting video content was probably less than £1,000.  The articles rank more highly than the website of the dive company that took them there.  Even with the cost of the trip factored in, it paid for itself within a year and, two years on, continues to pull in a steady stream of traffic with those high-ranking four word phrases (try “costa rica cocos sharks” and you’ll no longer be surprised to see a retailer of adventure luggage at number 3 on the first page).  The expectation is that it will continue for many years to send qualified prospects to the Red Oxx website at no additional cost – but this is not the only benefit.

Realising the holistic benefits

As I hinted earlier, the real benefits start to kick-in when your content becomes part of a wider strategy for your website. Dovetail with your email marketing in a way that reinforces your brand and supports your merchandise offering.  Allow your content to intertwine with your product pages and vice versa.  Your overall site search visibility will improve as people link to your content or click through from search results pages.

For Red Oxx, this strategy has delivered consistent and profitable double-digit organic growth.  It does no paid search.   It never sacrifices margin by discounting products in order to generate sales.  It no longer needs to tour the circuit of specialist consumer exhibitions (although they still do, mainly to gather ideas for fresh content).  Customers themselves generate a significant amount of content in the form of product reviews and travel diaries.  Jim even boasts of impatient email subscribers demanding to know when the next bulletin is being broadcast so they can read up on the latest Adventure Journals!

Of course, where merchants selling commodity products may struggle to achieve similar success, Red Oxx is a brand that is made for this strategy.  They make a unique range of products with a great story, and sell them to a booming market niche made up of voraciously inquisitive customers with money to spend. Notwithstanding the caveats, the Red Oxx story provides food for thought for any small online business, not least being this: if your brand is your passion, creating lots of keyword rich content can be not only fun, but perhaps the best long term investment you can make in your website.

Take-away points

• If your brand has a good story – tell it
• Write for the person you customer would like to be
• Research the long keyword phrases that will provide the sweet spot
• Create a content-rich landscape to boost overall site visibility
• Think holistically about your content

Article licensed for publication with Creative Commons “Attribution” terms.

First published in Catalogue & e-Business, September 2009

Measure email ‘success’ with care or risk squandering your list

When a merchant struggles to meet it’s sales plan, resisting the ‘send’ button on another email broadcast can be devilishly hard to do. Relatively fast and cheap compared to catalogues, where’s the harm with frequent email offers? Let’s explore the answer with one merchant’s true story from December that should give you cause for reflection.  Watching the sales roll in, they overlooked costly consequences.

But before I begin the case study, let’s jump ahead to the key learning points:

1. Be careful what you measure when evaluating your email marketing programme. If you only measure aggregate sales driven by email to determine effectiveness, the ‘send’ button can be a tempting but fickle friend. Pressure to achieve sales targets or maximize a seasonal opportunity drives up the frequency of email offers. But remember: an “It’s working, keep sending!” mentality has consequences that must also be measured.

2. Measure email results with an eye towards maximizing the lifetime (i.e., long-term) value of each address. That presupposes that you’ll have a *relationship* via email, which in turn assumes you’ll even be able to get your emails delivered to that person in the future. If you’re not regularly measuring deliverability and assessing receptivity (both explained below), with a similar kind of attention that you give to measuring sales, then watch out for a painful surprise.

Now back to the case study:

A multi-channel retailer with a bit over £1M in website sales conceived of a ‘deal of the day’ promotion to be delivered via email in the run up to Christmas. Their list consisted of customers or opt-in subscribers who had historically received 1 to 2 email offers per month. As usual, those email addresses received two offers at the start of the month. Then over the next 22 days, an additional 12 email offers arrived.

Each offer featured a product or category prominently, with a special price that expired at midnight or within the week. Each offer’s details appeared both as text (HTML) and again as a tasteful graphic, with the text version present in case the recipients’ email settings blocked images from being displayed. Subject lines conveyed urgency and opportunity. Sometimes two or three additional items received secondary placement. All in all, a professionally planned and executed campaign.

Near the top of every message appeared an invitation to opt-out of email offers with a red “click here” text link. While this always appeared at the bottom of every message, the additional placement at the top demonstrated the retailer’s concern about the potential frequency overload.

Let’s check results:

* Email was the merchant’s only ‘source’ of e-commerce traffic and sales that showed a gain over the prior year (other sources being organic search, catalogue direct referrals, etc. as measured by Google Analytics). On the way to a +30% gain over the prior December’s sales driven by email meant smiles all around the office and a continuing confidence in hitting the “send” button.

* In fact, sales from email helped the company grow year-on-year sales by 10%. Exclude the major contribution from email and sales would have contracted by nearly an equal amount.

By these measures, the email programme showed brilliance in conception and delivery during a very tough retail period. And that’s where the retailer was focussed:  on a measure of aggregate sales driven by email offers.

So let’s look closer and identify other consequences:

* Click through rates (meaning the # of human clicks on links within each email offer) declined from 7% to 5% to 3% to 1.5%.  This demonstrates a decline in interest or unwillingness to really “open” the message.  (By the way, conventional measures of “open rates” are rubbish since the advent of the message preview window. Clicks are what matter.)

* Subscriber list size declined 5% as a result of unsubscribes. People were taking up the offer at the top of the message to ‘click here’ and end the bombardment.

* The list contracted another 5% due to ‘bounces’. This can mean that ‘soft’ bounces due to full mailboxes turned into ‘hard’ or permanent bounces due to sufficient frequency of re-sends during a certain window of time.

* ISP’s noticed an increase in the rate at which recipients (the ISP’s customers) flagged the messages as spam. Combined with the higher than normal bounce rates, some ISP’s took action. One, the 4th most important ISP on the retailer’s list, temporarily blacklisted the merchant. This meant all messages were sent to junk mail and not delivered to recipients. Another ISP, Gmail, flagged the retailer with a “watch” status, meaning it was on the verge of being blacklisted, a fate from which it’s hard to recover with that particular ISP. And those are just the ISP’s the merchant knows about.

With hindsight, a seemingly successful programme may have weakened the brand’s ability to market effectively by email over the long-term. In my opinion, I would never wish to see a decline in the size of a list.  I would prioritise a focus on maintaining click-through rates that are above average.  As a result, I believe that sales growth will naturally follow.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.  She’s probably signed up to 10 or 20 email lists, depending on how prodigious a shopper she is.  We’re all vying for her attention, and a share in her discretional spending.  Unless she’s an ultimate fan of your brand (yes – they do exist, and you should make the most of them), surely it’s common sense that her attention span will diminish in inverse proportion to the number of messages you send her – until eventually she doesn’t even notice what they’re emailing about?  The tragedy of this scattergun strategy is that when you finally email your customer with something she genuinely is interested in, she may well have hit the delete button before she even noticed.

The risk of too frequent *broadcasts* is email list fatigue and contraction. And you won’t know what too frequent is for your customers unless you can really measure it. Moreover, you risk the reputation of your server and business, should ISP’s decide not to deliver your messages. So you’d do well to measure ‘deliverability’, too.

Since 2006, my companies have relied on an email marketing platform from E-business Coach that measures the health of my programme in these ways. See the list nearby for important questions to ask your email service provider, or to ask when evaluating a new one.

Here’s one way in which I would have handled the campaign detailed above differently.  After the 2nd in the flurry of email offers, I would have filtered the list according to the actions of the recipients themselves. Did they click on a link, giving a true measure of whether they opened the message and paid attention? If yes, send them a subsequent offer. Measure. Repeat.

This kind of email campaign becomes an exercise in “narrowcasting” as compared with universal “broadcasting” to the whole list. An email campaign sustains and strengthens a retailer when it encourages customer relationships by narrowcasting relevant offers at an “appropriate” frequency. The current retail climate is the perfect time to use such a strategy, given that there are many retailers who will find it difficult to resist the send button over the coming year, and tax our patience in the process.

What do you think? Please write in to share your assessment or suggestion for handling this retailer’s email campaign. What would you do differently given the chance?

*********************************************************************************
Can you measure these essential aspects of your email programme?

Ask your email service provider, or the next one you evaluate:

1. Can I measure the rate at which my messages are delivered to the top (50, 100, or more) ISP’s?

2. Can I test that deliverability before I send the final version of my message.  In other words, can I test deliverability without sending to my own list?

3. Can I measure click-through rates, or the number of times a link in the message was clicked?

4. Can I identify specifically which link each recipient of the message clicked?

5. Can I easily develop a follow-up recipient list tailored to those email addresses that show having clicked on a certain link?

If you’re capable of running an email campaign with those capabilities above, you’re well on your way to making email a sustainable driver of web sales, come good times or bad.

*********************************************************************************

© Murray Kenneth 2009
First published in Catalogue & e-Business
Picture by S Migol

Point – press – publish, and hey presto: welcome to the digital age of photography!

If only it were so easy.  The “happy slapper” school of photography may work in theory, but it won’t get you very far in practice if you’re setting out to produce compelling, high quality catalogue photography that’s going to send your new season products flying out the door.

Why then do so many start-ups and small retailers fall into the “DIY trap” when it comes to photography?  Well – most of us can snap a picture and some may even qualify as enthusiastic amateurs.  Desperate to reduce the break-even point for our catalogues, it’s tempting to target the photography budget as a potential area of saving.  It may be hard to resist – but any decision should be preceded by some sober contemplation of a fairly stern health warning: “poor photography can seriously damage the health of your business!”

So why is decent photography so expensive in the first place?  First let’s consider what we need to achieve with our photography.  On the one hand we need the customer to see enough product detail to make them comfortable about with making a purchase.  On the other hand, many of us need to show our products being used in a context with which the customer can identify or aspire to.  Rather like good copywriting, good photography sells the benefits of ownership as well as illustrating the features of the product.

Capturing the product features is usually achieved with simple, uncluttered pack shots – generally photographed in a studio against a white or neutral background.  A good quality, well-lit pack shot at a high enough resolution to print in your catalogue as well as publish on your website will cost you anything between £20 and £40 per shot plus an extra £10 or so for the clipping path if you wish to use the picture as a cut-out. 

Lifestyle shots on the other hand are usually photographed in a purpose built studio set or on a suitable location and may well require models, props, an army of helpers, good weather and a generous dose of inspiration!  Broad brush budgeting here is very difficult until you know exactly what you need.  A good fashion or lifestyle photographer will cost £750-£1,000 a day, plus an assistant at around £150 a day.  An art director will cost around £750 and a stylist around £300.  Catalogue models can cost from £200 upwards.  On top of all that, you need to budget for props, transport, catering – as well as studio time and labour for building and taking down your set.  If you’re on location, a house can cost you upwards of £1000 a day and remember that if you’re asking an agency to manage the whole process, you’ll be paying for their admin and mark-up too.  Don’t overestimate the number of shots you can achieve in a day – then do the maths: it won’t be pretty!

The reality for a small and growing catalogue business is usually something like this.  You have a chunk of new products for the season so you need a fresh and new-looking catalogue.  You already have existing shots of your continuing products, and you’ll have a selection of supplier shots that may or may not be of appropriate quality to use.  With your limited budget, there’s no way you can afford to shoot or re-shoot everything that you’d like to.  So where do you start?

1.    Work to a budget.  It’s easy to build a basic costing model in a spreadsheet – you’ll need this to keep track of whether your plans fit with your budget. 

2.    Compile your wish list.  Work with your team and, in another spreadsheet, detail every shot from every page and include columns for shot type, props, models and locations.

3.    Properly assess your supplier shots and use what you can.  You’ll need to learn how to check for adequate resolution and size and be aware of the technical requirements for your catalogue – it’s not rocket science.

4.    Prioritise.  Starting with your covers and hotspots, your hero products and your page stoppers, and you’re bog-standard pack shots.  Keep playing with your spreadsheets until you’ve got a shoot list you think you can afford – then consult your photographer to make sure he or she agrees!

A good plan of your requirements makes all the difference so it’s really worth investing the time, consulting your team and getting it right.  With a plan in place you can begin to turn to the practical issues of executing it within the constraints of your budget.  This is the point where you face a lot of choices in terms of what you can achieve yourself, and what you need to dig into your budget for.

Some companies will already be working with an agency on their catalogue design and the agency in question is likely to be keen to manage the photography too – it helps them to achieve a consistent look and feel throughout the book.  Work with your agency and help them to prepare a proposal.  It’s not always “the expensive option” to hand over the reigns, so long as the agency is properly briefed and really understands your products, their key selling points, and your branding objectives.  In fact, agencies are very often rather skilled at executing a cost-efficient photo shoot so you may even save some money. 

Many of us will be working with a layout artist (either in-house or external) rather than a design agency to execute the catalogue layout – and in such cases it will fall to us to plan and orchestrate the catalogue photography in it’s entirety.  This is by no means impossible, and provides the greatest opportunity for making those economies that we so desperately strive.

Choose your photographer.  It’s so important to choose a photographer that matches your requirements and has the right skills and experience for your job.  In the past I’ve mistakenly believed that a great “fashion” photographer will manage to add the creative “X-factor” – only to find that the specification of each shot and the number of shots scheduled for the day have constrained the photographers creativity to such an extent that you end up with fairly bland but expensive shots.

Use your internal resources.  Never underestimate the administration effort required for successful photography, but if you can spare the resource you will certainly save some money by managing it yourself.  Similarly, if you have creative talent within the organisation use it to both in the planning and execution of your photography.  There’s a good chance your buyer or merchandiser will have a deeper understanding of your brand than a third party stylist – if they’ve got the talent, use them.  Second a member of your warehouse team to the logistics effort.  They will certainly know what the product looks like and there’s not much worse than having to bin a shot because the product can’t be found.

Choose good models.  We all remember the early Boden catalogues full of Jonnie’s good-looking friends but is it a cost effective strategy?  There’s no doubt that if you can pull in a favour or persuade some friends with fistful of vouchers you’ll make some savings on model fees but the pitfalls are many.  Will they photograph well?  Will they put up with the waiting around?  Will they take instructions?  Have you complied with all the procedural and legal requirements?  We suspect that Jonnie valued his friendships and the quality of his shots long before he let on to his adoring audience!

Many companies are now saving money by doing their own pack shots.  For an investment equivalent to around 50-75 pack shots at commercial rates, you can buy a decent camera and lighting kit and some white background coving. Send someone on a one-day course on studio photography and you’ll soon recover your investment and be in the wonderful position of being able to shoot, shoot and re-shoot products at a very low cost.  There will always be limitations on what you can produce this way, but so long as you are aware of them and create shots for an appropriate purpose, you’re quids in.

In summary, photography is rarely a black and white choice between DIY and outsourcing.  Most of us end up in the grey middle ground, managing elements of it ourselves, but using professionals of varying standards to fill the gaps in our internal skill sets.  There aren’t really many corners to cut and there is no substitute for a detailed plan and thorough understanding of every detail in the process.   With this knowledge you’ll be well placed to make the choices that will eek out your budget to the maximum.

**************************************************************************

Top 5 tips for photography on a budget
1.    Plan, plan and re-plan
2.    Understand the process and know your capabilities
3.    Choose the right photographer for the right job
4.    Crack the whip and drive the process
5.    Invest in a basic pack-shot set-up

Top 5 pitfalls of managing your own photography
1.    Poor planning and lack of prioritisation
2.    An underestimation of the resources required
3.    Unrealistic scheduling
4.    Exhausted creative team
5.    Unprofessional models

**************************************************************************

© Murray Kenneth 2009
First published in Catalogue & e-Business