by Erik Dungan

Putting a wedding gallery online is pretty worthless if no one ever goes there. Last weekend I shot my first wedding of the year. I thought I’d use the event as a way to explore techniques for getting people to a gallery and (hopefully) increasing print sales. 

I honestly had no idea how to get the word out to wedding guests. My initial thought was to collect email addresses at the wedding (just on a piece of paper). But, I emailed with Brad at BCI Photography in Palm Beach, Florida. He recommended against collecting emails–instead he suggested having cards printed and handing them out at the reception. So, that’s what I did. 

I created a 4×6 card in Photoshop and added an engagement picture of the couple (see below). I had 100 of the cards printed at ProDPI (cost of $26) and brought them to my wedding. I should note that I cheated a little bit: I didn’t send people directly to my NextProof gallery. I created a notification page on my site and let people enter their email address there. Then, as people add their email, I add it to my NextProof email list. I mainly did this because the gallery was empty and I didn’t have engagement images in there.

Download the PSD file

So, I put a stack of cards near the gift table and the wedding coordinator was even nice enough to put some on the guest tables. So far, about 15 people have requested to be notified when the images are online. I figure that’s pretty good since this was a small wedding (100 guests is my estimate). 

So, I’ll post on this again once I get the wedding online and send an email out to everyone. Now, let’s have some feedback. 

How do you plan to get wedding guests to your gallery? 

Are there any holes in my method?

How soon do you post an event online?

Erik,

How do you put the Notification page on your site? And what form do you get the emails in? How do we put those into our NextProof email list? Thanks!

Also, Scott and I create a small tent card, twice the size of a business card, that we fold in half into a tent. The front has an image of the couple and our vital info and the back has the website address and password. This way they have our business card with a picture of the wedding couple on it. This goes on the fridge and our name is up there for quite a while!

We try to post online as soon as possible. And, we are trying to limit the online hosting for three months only. That way we can get the orders completed in a reasonable amount of time and not worry about lingering orders on old weddings.

Great idea. Thanks for sharing this!

Scott, where do you get these tent cards printed? And could you share a picture of one? (or email it to me). Thanks.

It would be great if the gallery displayed a message like: “please pre-register for so and sos wedding” instead of event unavailable.

This is a perfect item for our promo packs! 100 4×6’s of the same file for $15.00, 5×7’s for 25.00.

Great post Erik!

Erik,

I’ve been trying to get my nextproof account up to snuff to go live and you just showcased a solution to one of my problems. I do not want to send wedding guests (and clients) to an empty gallery.

How did you create your notification page? I would love to have something like this.

Mind you, I’m not a coder.. I rely on you guys for that stuff. Seriously though, this is something that should be a standard feature for next proof.

Hi Ramon,

We’re adding the ability for visitors to pre-register for events that aren’t live yet. We hope to have it this week, but if you’re in a pinch, I can help you set something up.

Thanks! But I think I’ll be alright for now. I’m just super excited about next proof and the way you guys keep tweaking it and adding features.

I hope someone sees this since I’m chiming in pretty late here. I have been working on setting up my nextproof galleries, and I have a question about the registration. I would like to require that visitors register, but the only registration form I see also requires that the visitor also creates a login and password. It seems like we’re asking the visitors to do an awful lot of work so we can sell them images; register their email address, make a log in with a password and know the password to the gallery. Is there a way to bypass the login/password for the visitor so that they only need to supply an email address and the password to the gallery they wish to see?

Denice,

The reason we have people register is so they can save their favorites and come back and download any digital negatives if they want..this also cuts down time at checkout..

hope this helps…

thanks