Best practice for photography prints. Can be applied to other art mediums and non art products.
Pricing your art is crucial to the success of your business. Here’s a tried and trusted strategy that will help uncomplicate the pricing dilemma for you.
There’s three tiers to consider:
- Cheap
- Middle
- High
Cheap
Greeting cards and postcards: sell for approximately $4. That’s something people can afford, but it consumes a lot of labor and the reward *is not * great.
8x12 piece: $25 is the magic number. It attracts people who aren’t planning on buying and asks consumers to only spend a little bit. They would have bought the greeting card but now they spend more. Profit margin goes way up but workload is down.
2 for $40: for a mere $15 more, the buyer can own a matching set. This is a huge up-sell opportunity.
I strongly suggest against providing greeting cards and postcards due to the lack of ROI. The next prices up ($25 & $40) are still affordable to the same audience. Many consumers will be content to spend a little more, but if you supply $4 items you often will have lost the $25 or $40 sale.
Middle
12x18 prints: $45 or 2 for $70
16x24 85 or 2 for 140
This tier system establishes a comfortable financial place that everyone can purchase your art in.
10 sales of two art pieces at $40 = $400. That’s better than offloading 100 greeting cards, and also saves you a TON of time setting up and socially navigating sales.
High
- Larger expensive art pieces can sell for $500 - $4000 and will push your business revenue over the top.
It is very important to have high end products for consumers who want something dramatic and have disposable income.
Sell Yourself
It is your job to compel buyers and communicate that you are the artist that has the piece that will move them.
- Make them feel comfortable
- Be welcoming
- Tell a story about the art piece
If you don’t offer dramatic expensive pieces, you will have no way to connect with that type of audience. They will overlook you, walk on by, leave your online page. You will be invisible to an entire target segment if you don’t clearly display that you have something for their needs.
You are now equipped to and sell to different income levels; people who have a little money and a lot. The 3 tier art pricing gives you the ability to reach as many people as possible while optimizing financial business revenue.
If products are too expensive, you will struggle to sell a few pieces. What happens if you don’t sell a few expensive pieces with no smaller bread and butter products to fall back on? Well, no bread and butter, that’s what happens.
The best part of this pricing strategy is that MORE people will have your art, because of the variety cost tiers. More people = more exposure = more sales = more exposure = more sales = more…. okay, you get the picture.
Now go out there and
sell sell sell!
Content © 2021 Hive Believer aka Ana Clark; advertising and marketing expert, graduate of St. Lawrence College.
Photo credits:
Sketches and photo edits by Ana Clark