Do you currently offer mini sessions in your business? Maybe you have recently rolled them out and found that they didn’t sell out as fast as you had hoped for. If that sounds like you, this blog post is exactly what you needed to figure out why your sessions are not selling quickly.

Mini sessions are supposed to be the thing in a photographer’s business that sell quickly and allow them to make them fast cash once or twice a year. But sometimes, mini-sessions sound easier and more ideal than they actually are because they may not be flying off the shelf quite as you expected.

Here are my three questions for you…

1. Are you selling value over facts?

Think about it like this; when you hear a photographer pitch what they have to offer to a potential client, they often talk about the offer’s facts. They talked about how many hours the session is, how many photos they give back, how quickly they have a turnaround time, or even the location they’ve chosen. The problem with this is, every photographer does this. Every photographer can offer a 30-minute session with five images. It isn’t unique, nor does it allow them to stand out in a client’s mind.

The reality is though those pieces of their offer are just facts. People cannot connect to facts like they do emotions. Trying to sell through the idea of a fact will make your job a lot harder because most times, clients don’t actually care about the offer’s facts nearly as much as they care about the outcome of the offer and the emotion that comes with getting their images.

2. Are you giving them a time frame to take action?

Are you just posting about mini-sessions and giving them weeks to take action with you? If that’s the case, there is no real urgency to take action on the offer, I suggest building up excitement for mini sessions to Launch and then giving them a quick timeframe to take action.

An example would be if you are hosting mini sessions on October 27th, launch them on October 1st and give them until October 14th to sign up. This gives people enough time frame to plan for the mini session, but not too much time to take action. Plus, if you have built up enough excitement for your mini sessions, they should sell out before that two-week mark! 

3. A waitlist is a must

The fastest and easiest way to sell anything is through a waitlist. For the month leading up to you launching your mini sessions, be sure to be talking about them multiple times a week, and continuously pushing people towards a waitlist. Then, launch your sessions to the waitlist 24 hours early so that way some of the spots can show up before it goes live to the public. That way, when you want it open to the public, you can say that the waitlist has already grabbed X number of slots, so be sure to grab yours before they are all gone. 

A waitlist is the best way to add urgency and add in that scarcity aspect that’s so many photographers leave out.

PS – have you been looking into starting an email list for your photography business? If so, grab our email marketing for photographers free download and learn how you can create a successful email list that consistently brings in new clients.