Vision Art Albums Review & How to Include in Your Photography Packages
Today I’m reviewing Vision Art albums and then showing you both how and why to include them in your wedding photography packages. We include custom wedding albums in all of our photography packages as a way to add value to our clients and build a sustainable business. Our couples get have their most favorite photos and wedding memories preserved in a timeless product that they cherish for years to come.
First, I’ll share why we chose Vision Art as our album company (shop the Vision Art website) and continue to use them over a decade later. Then, I’ll discuss the reasons your clients need a fine art album. It will benefit them and it will benefit your business too.
Finally, we’ll dive into the different ways that you can include wedding photo albums in your photography packages. By the end of this article, I hope I have you rethinking how the best wedding photo albums can add value to your clients so that your business and their marriage can thrive.
A Review of Vision Art Fine Art Album Company
We build our wedding photography packages to include a fine art wedding album for a handful of reasons that benefit both our business and our clients. They increase value for our clients and profits for our business once again bolstering our motto that serving your clients well will serve you well.
In this article, I’m going to introduce you to Vision Art, our choice for wedding album companies that we’ve been using for over a decade. I’m going to talk about the various reasons why we love these albums and our clients do too.
Vision Art sponsored three videos that you’ll see throughout this post. Let me start by saying that while they offered to sponsor the content that I’ll be presenting to you over this fine art album series, they didn’t require that I give them any input on what I say or how I say it. We’ve been loyal customers of Vision Art using them as albums for pictures of our clients as well as for our own family photos.
Vision Art is Known For Thoughtful Customer Service and Support
To kick off this wedding album review, let me share that we first found Vision Art at a trade show where we looked at and compared numerous album companies. Vision Art immediately appealed to us because of the album styles that we’ll talk about in a minute. However, one of the big reasons that we haven’t hesitated to stick with Vision Art for over a decade is that they provide incredible customer support.
The album design and ordering process is smooth and worry-free because we know that if we do make a mistake, their team is knowledgeable and responsive. If they notice anything awry with an album design or even our images, they’ll confirm and even provide easy solutions before printing. Their consistent attention to detail and commitment to excellence is like having another team member ensuring we deliver high-quality products to our clients.Now on to what initially attracted us to Vision Art Albums. These albums are both high-quality and durable as they’re crafted with top-of-the-line materials that last. From the thick, lay-flat pages to the durable binding, each album is designed to be a long-lasting heirloom.
We Love These Beautiful Albums
In fact, we’ve given some albums to venues to use to showcase their space. These albums endure heavy abuse, unlike the care a couple might give their own possessions. We show them at bridal shows where hundreds of hands flip through the album in one day and they’ve held up really well over.
Their lay-flat design, which means there’s a seam instead of a fold, lets you design spreads straight across without any disruption in the middle. This is great whether they’re storytelling collages or full-image panoramas. This feature brings photos to life, especially those wide shots that capture the essence of the day.
We always include a few full-image spreads in our album designs and they add an impact to the viewing experience that our clients love. Their soft-touch matte finish feels premium, enhancing the tactile experience of the album. This unique finish adds a touch of luxury that’s hard to find elsewhere.
High-Quality and Eco-Friendly Materials
Additionally, Vision Art’s fine art printing process uses archival inks and high-quality paper that capture every detail and depth in the images, preserving color, texture, and tone with impressive accuracy and consistency. In fact, we used to ship albums to our studio so that we could review them.
But now we trust Vision Art so much that we drop ship directly to our clients saving us time and getting them their albums faster. We also love that Vision Art is committed to sustainability, using eco-friendly materials and practices in their production which is great for those who value environmentally responsible craftsmanship.
An Album that fits our style
As you’ll see from their website, Vision Art offers a variety of customization options. You can offer your clients a wide range of choices—from cover materials and colors to unique embossing options which can help you design albums that reflect each couple’s style or fit various budgets. Personally, what attracted us to Vision art is the PhotoWrap cover which we now use for all of our wedding albums.
If a client came to us with a specific vision for an album, we would for sure customize it for them but since most of our clients don’t know what they want, our albums are designed in a timeless way that we think really highlights the wedding images.
The photo wrap cover allows the book to be art itself and showcase one of the landscape portraits that we’re known for. This allows people to see the book on a coffee table or bookshelf and be inspired to open it after previewing hard cover and the quality of photography to be found within the pages of the book.
7 reasons why your clients need a fine art wedding album
Now let’s talk about how offering quality photography albums can help elevate your business. Whenever we offer any product or service, we first need to understand why our clients need it so that we can be clear on how it adds value to our clients. This will in turn help us better promote our offerings.
I’m going to talk through 8 reasons why your clients need a fine art wedding album. These reasons will help you understand the value of offering tangible products and give you language for selling them to your couples as well.
Offering more value in your packages allows you to increase your pricing
We all know that clients are viewing photography portfolios and comparing style, personality, and price. In my photography pricing for profit series on YouTube I emphasize the importance of competing on value rather than competing on price. You need to build profitable packages so that your business can grow and sustain you.
One of the best ways to beat the competition is to offer more value in your packages. If you know that you need to make an average of $5000/wedding for 20 weddings per year, then you have to find ways to increase your package averages. You can charge more if you’re more experienced, have a unique style, or offer a lot of value in your packages.
If with another photographer they only get 8 hours but with you, they get 10, they’ll feel like that has more value. And if one photographer only delivers the digital files but you deliver a beautiful fine art album, that has value. We’ll talk more about how to include albums in your photography packages in the next video of this series so make sure you’re subscribed. But for now, let’s talk about the value of albums.
It’s a Tangible investment in their memories
Everyone talks about how photography is the one thing you have after the wedding day is over. But it’s not… if the photos are buried on a hard drive somewhere. If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on photography, you should have something tangible at the end of the day.
You should have art hanging on your walls or a fine art album on your coffee table, ideally both.
Albums are a great way to Experience the Story
While I love both wall art and fine art albums, albums are a great way to relive a larger story. While one image tells a story, a series of images is a photo essay, telling a series of stories from a handful of tiny moments. You can remember that you laughed, you cried, you danced.
You can even relive things that you didn’t witness the first time because you were in a different room.
Albums are Easy access
Instead of searching your hard drive or pulling up a slideshow, you can simply grab your wedding album off the shelf any time you want to. We use these same albums for family photos and they sit on a table in our living room. Every once in a while I’ll come out to find my kids sitting on the couch flipping through the album talking about that vacation we went on or how cute they were as babies.
After I ask them if they’ve washed their hands because these are important albums to Mommy, I usually sit down and join them in telling stories of our family adventures of that special day.
Albums are Perfect for Sharing Your Photos
As photographers, we love sharing photos from our trips or other adventures. Similarly, newlyweds love sharing photos from their weddings. But having house guests over to sit down and flip through an online gallery of 700 photos isn’t as impactful as having an album they can flip through at their own pace.
Maybe it’s because I’m a photographer but whenever I’m in a friend’s house and I spy a wedding album, I always pick it up so that I can witness their love story. Whether I was there or not, whether I was the photographer or not! You can look at an album sitting around the table continuing a conversation.
Conversely staring at a computer screen is a different experience.
A Fine Art Album is High-quality for timeless preservation
If we’re talking about wedding albums being heirlooms and handled by kids with potentially sticky fingers, we need high-quality durable albums. We don’t want the colors to fade. To be honest I have thought about having little gloves next to the albums but then I’m one step closer to plastic on my furniture like my great aunt had.
And I want my kids flipping through these books. Even our sample albums or the albums we’ve ordered for venues to have on display have held up great over time. Venue and sample albums often get handled frequently and carelessly.
We take these to bridal shows where couples walk around with food and beverage samples. And they’re still in great shape. It’s kind of the same philosophy we have with gear if you’ve read or listened to many of Marc’s gear reviews, you want durable gear that doesn’t slow you down rather than fragile gear that you’re afraid to use.
The Album is a work of art itself
We all have books on our bookshelves that we like because of the contents. And then we have books that we use as part of our interior design strategy. The beautiful books that sit on our bookshelves and coffee tables.
Fine Art albums can be both! I love it when people decorate with things that are both beautiful and meaningful. When they have photos on the walls or books on their tables that show a piece of their story and tell of their values.
Fine art albums are good for business
One of the main marketing strategies that I always talk about is that serving your clients well will serve you well. When our clients look at their albums every year on their anniversary, they’ll remember us and mention us to a friend who is getting married. Or they’ll call us when they have a baby and need family photos.
Referrals are ideal because our best clients come from our best clients. We’ve had couples who saw one of our wedding albums at a friend’s house and then called us to photograph their wedding. If you’re convinced that your clients need a fine art album, stay tuned because up next in this series we’ll talk about how to include albums in your packages.
Including Vision Art Albums in Photography Packages
Now we’ll talk through package structure as well as how to sell these upgrades to your clients. I’m going to help you navigate how to start adding albums to your package structure. Let’s dive in.
How to include albums in your wedding packages:
There are a handful of ways to include wedding albums in your packages.
You can use them to create package tiers
You can inclue an album credit that keeps things flexible for customization
It can be part of your Post-wedding emotionally charged sales strategy
Or you can use them as a way to increase package value thus increasing your package minimum and overall profits
Package Tiers with Album Options
You can Create Package Tiers with Album Options by offering packages that include different types of albums or upgrade options. For instance, have a base package with a small album, a mid-tier package with a larger album, and a premium package with a fully customized fine art album. This is a great way to differentiate between your wedding packages and have added value in bigger packages.
Include an Album Credit in Your Packages
Instead of a set album, you can offer a credit toward an album. This gives couples the flexibility to choose an album size and style they like, which increases the likelihood they’ll want to customize and add on. This is great if you really want to focus on customization helping your clients design a truly unique product.
It could also be used effectively in conjunction with a post-wedding sales strategy.
Offering albums as a Post-Wedding Add-On
Offering albums as a post-weddint add-on is great if you’re just starting out and aiming for lower cost wedding packages but want to increase sales after the fact. It’s also a good strategy if you’re a great salesperson. Some couples might be more interested in an album after seeing their photos.
Offer the album as a post-wedding add-on with a discount if they decide within a certain period, which can increase your chances of sales. I will say that we did this in the beginning of our business but found that we preferred selling the albums up front rather than after the wedding day. That’s my personal preference though, I would say this is a great model for someone who is a salesperson who is great at using the emotion of the wedding photos to sell products.
I have colleagues who are masters of getting clients to spend more money after the fact when they’re in love with their photos.
Include wedding albums as a way to increase package value
The longer you’re in business as a wedding photographer the more important it becomes to build a sustainable business. This means making sure that you’re maximizing value for your clients so that each client will be of higher value to you. While some photographers have a bulk client model where they try to book as many clients as possible, I’m a proponent of booking quality clients over quantity.
And in order to do so, I need to deliver quality to my clients. If I want to charge more for my wedding packages I need them to include things that my clients will value for years to come. Wedding albums are a tangible product from the wedding day and something we include for all the reasons I talked about in my last video of this series.
I like to do this sales up front and get my clients booking bigger packages from the beginning rather than waiting until after the wedding. This allows me to better predict my yearly income and know how many weddings I need to shoot. If that’s something you’re interested in, I’ll be talking about that in my money for Photographers series so be sure you’re subscribed to the blog and YouTube channel.
How to Sell Fine Art Albums
In this final section, lets bring everything together to help you sell a premium photo album to your clients. How can we talk about our custom wedding albumin a way that our clients want their own album?
How tangible prints and products add value
Everyone says that wedding photography is important because it’s the one thing that you have left at the end of the wedding day. Clients spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding but the food and beverages are consumed and flowers and decorations are often thrown away. If my clients are going to be spending thousands on photography, I want them to actually have something to show for it at the end of the wedding day.
In your marketing, client meetings, and sales calls, you can emphasize the value of physical prints and products in preserving memories. You can talk about how an album is a lasting investment, one that doesn’t depend on technology and offers a deeply personal way to relive the wedding day. There’s a difference between scrolling through your wedding files on the computer in the office and cozying up on the couch to peruse the wedding album.
Let’s talk about some of the ways we do this:
Show Sample Vision Art Albums During Consultations
We let our clients physically see and feel a sample album. Showcasing sample albums in consultations or meetings is a powerful way to demonstrate quality, design, and style, making it easier for clients to envision their own. They also start to understand the value of the album and if our packages are higher than another photographer who doesn’t include an album, they know that they’ll be walking about with something tangible.
Partner with a High-Quality Album Company like Vision Art Albums
Working with a reputable album company (like Vision Art! The sponsor of this post) ensures that your albums match the quality and style of your photography. Consistency in quality reflects well on your brand and reinforces the value of the album option. Many couples think that they can do an album themselves, which they can, so it’s important to use a professional lab where there’s a noticeable quality difference from what your client can order themselves online.
Emphasize the Storytelling Value of an Album
When discussing albums, frame them as a curated story rather than just a collection of photos. Explain that an album tells their wedding day’s story in a beautiful, intentional way that digital galleries just can’t achieve. Now, I’m a proponent of slideshows too, don’t get me wrong. I’m also a fan of beautiful wall art. But a wedding day is a series of memorable moments that can be crafted into an elegant story in the pages of an album.
Include Testimonials from Past Clients
If you have happy clients who’ve raved about their albums, and you can showcase these testimonials to tell stories about these clients. Hearing from other couples about how much they love their albums can help nudge prospective clients to invest in one for themselves. We always talk about how back before we started including albums in our packages, couples who thought they were going to design one themselves rather than order from us would come to us later for help.
We always think we’re going to have time but this is my job, I design a couple dozen albums every year. My clients can be involved and have input, but this is part of the service we’re providing.
Conclusion: How will you utilize Vision Art Albums in Your Business
So what do you think? What’s the best way for your business to start offering Vision Art, the best wedding photo albums? Are you going to increase your packages and include them or master the art of sales once your couples are attached to their photos?
Maybe you’ll convince your clients that the custom wedding albums you offer make the perfect wedding gift for their parents. We utilize the various sizes to offer parent albums or hit different wedding budgets. You could even offer three sizes for three packages.
Or perhaps you can simply ask them how they want to view their favorite wedding memories every anniversary. Do they want to sit at their desk or hold their premium photo album withe a leather or photowrap cover and seamless spreads? Ready to shop? Check out Vision Art albums!
More Wedding Photography Tips
Here on the Bergreen blog, we teach the basics of photography for both Brides and photographers. We offer tips for planning for weddings from location advice and beyond.
Photographers can learn things about the exposure triangle and camera settings. We also review some of our favorite photography gear. Let us know what you’re interested in and we’ll do our best to help take your photography to the next level.
Next, check out our candid wedding moments shooting guide or our 9 Best Tips for Outdoor Wedding Photographers. Links to products are affiliate links.
About the author
I am Brenda Bergreen, one half of an Evergreen husband and wife photography team specializing in Colorado wedding photography and videography, and adventure photography. If you need wedding photography tips or advice on the best gear for your goals, reach out. I share advice based on 13+ years as a wedding photographer.
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