How To Price Your Pet Photography Sessions & Digital Packages

So, you’re a new pet photographer and you have no idea how to price your sessions.

In fact, it’s highly likely you are just going with a very inexpensive session fee that gives away the entire kit and kaboodle, but you are quickly realizing that that is not a sustainable way to do business.

You want to make more money and figure out how to price yourself according to your unique business.

Today, we are going to talk about how to figure out your base pricing for two different options.

So, that means offering up a session fee with digitals included and/or pricing for a session fee and digital packages, so that you can upsell your clients.

Keep reading to learn how to do just that or you can watch the full tutorial right here on YouTube.

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How To Price Your Pet Photography Sessions & Digital Packages

In my experience, I have found that 99% of photographers generally start with a flat session fee and usually price their session fees based on what they see other photographers in their market charging for a similar option.

Can you relate? I can!

There is nothing wrong with that and we’ve all been there, but it’s really important to understand your numbers, your time invested, your overhead, and why you are charging what you are charging, so that you can create a sustainable business.

The problem with looking at everyone else is it doesn’t reflect the value you provide and you are basing your pricing off of their numbers (if they actually know what their numbers are).

Now that that disclaimer is out of the way, let’s talk about how to price your pet photography sessions and digital packages!

FIRST: Determine your hourly rate to figure out what your base session fee should be

What do you want to make per hour to start? $25? $50? $100? This is entirely up to you and there is no right or wrong answer!

Then, I want you to calculate how many hours currently it takes for you to work with a client from start to finish. From inquiry to project completion. That’s right — anything and everything to do with working with one single client!

If you want to make $50 per hour and you know it takes you five hours to work with a client (say including the session and five edited digitals) then that means your sessions need to be $250 at minimum to be profitable for your specific business.

But, here’s the kicker, that $50 per hour actually turns into more like $25 per hour after you’ve pulled out your taxes, insurance, and other business expenses.

Most businesses generally have about 40% they are investing back into their business, which is why we cut that hourly rate in half especially if you are set up as a sole proprietorship as I am currently.

SECOND: Offer digital package options in addition to a standard session fee

By now, you can determine your hourly rate and time working with a client to determine your session fee.

But, what if you want to give clients more options than five digitals with your $250 session or what if clients ask to buy more digitals files?

Offering digital packages alongside a session fee, deposit, or retainer (whatever you like to call it) helps us to increase our average sale and gives our clients an opportunity to spend more with us if they want.

And let me tell you, as a pet photographer, people love their pets, and want all of their images, so they usually will buy more.

The session fee, retainer, or deposit simply holds their date and time and gets them invested in the session, right?

It also helps you prevent no-shows or flaky people.

The session fee/retainer/deposit can be whatever pricepoint you want, but make sure it’s enough that they are going to have skin in the game. For this example, let’s say our retainer, session fee, or deposit is $100, which can be applied as a product credit to one of our digital packages later on.

So, we know we want to make $50 per hour. And in this example, it takes us two hours to edit five digitals, as shown in our base package pricing of $250 we discussed earlier.

That means our lowest package for digitals, in this example, is $249. For 10 digitals would be $349. 15 digitals for $449. Or all of the digitals or say 25 would be $649.

(Remember, we are determining our pricing based on $50 per hour of our time and the fact that it takes us two hours to completely edit five digital files)

Once you take out the retainer of $100 out of that, you are making additional gross profit for each package.

THIRD: Be sure to anchor what package you want to sell by making it the most enticing

The trick with pricing your digital packages is to also anchor what package you really want to sell by making it the most irresistible.

Psychology states that people generally don’t want the lowest price or highest priced, but somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot.

In this example, if your goal is to make $499 per session, then your middle package, say 10 digitals, needs to be $499 and adjust your other packages accordingly.

FOURTH: Give the client more bang for their buck

The last thing I will say about pricing your digitals is that generally the more the client buys, the more the client saves.

In other words, your lowest package could actually be more expensive per digital than your highest; hence, the higher the package, the lower the cost per image giving them more images and bang for their buck.

Assuredly, pricing is an art form and I know this is sort of a rough and rowdy methodology, but I do hope it’s given you a great starting point for understanding how to start with a base pricing model and selling digital packages to make more money in your pet photography business today!

I’m sure you’ll have questions, so drop those in the comments below this post. In the meantime, get out there and figure out either your session fee and/or your deposit and digital packages today!

Need more help on figuring out your pricing? We now offer 1:1 Pet Photography Power Hours to help you do just that! Learn more about our coaching services here.