Trends in wedding and portrait photography with Zenfolio

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talks with Pamela Vachon and Keith Barraclough about Zenfolio's recent industry survey of photographers, the changes wrought by COVID, and how technology is changing how photographers work.

Pamela Vachon is vice president, marketing operations, at Zenfolio. Keith Barraclough is CTO, EVP analytics, at Zenfolio,

Zenfolio Inc. offers advanced business solutions enabling photographers to easily show, share and sell their images and videos. For the past 15 years, Zenfolio has proudly served photographers around the globe.

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Chapters

• 17:34 [Ad] The Dark Horse Entrepreneur | Helping Parents Make Money Online
• 18:00 (Cont.) Trends in wedding and portrait photography with Zenfolio

Transcript

Erin Manning  0:02  
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau  0:10  
The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Photo Finale and Advertek Printing. Hello again, and welcome to the dead pixel society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. And today we're joined by Pamela Vachon, the Vice President, marketing operations for Zenfolio and Keith Barraclough  the CTO and head of product. Hi, Pamela, honey, Keith, how are you today?

Keith Barraclough  0:35  
Doing well, thanks.

Pamela Vachon  0:37  
Good. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Gary Pageau  0:38  
So, for the 12, people who aren't familiar with Zenfolio, can you share with us a little bit about the company and your roles within it.

Pamela Vachon  0:46  
So Zenfolio is a website and kind of complete workflow provider for photographers, everything from proofing, to ordering, and even workflow such as taking client bookings. I've been at Zenfolio for about 10 years, and I'm currently the vice president of marketing operations, I head up part of my marketing and also the customer support and Customer Success groups, I kind of make sure that all of our marketing technology is working for the marketing team, but also make sure that the support and success teams are doing everything they can to help our photographers be more successful.

Unknown Speaker  1:26  
Okay, and Keith. And my job is to make Pam successful. And beyond that, obviously, through through Pam, to make all our photography successful. And my role has been to build out the platforms that support our photographers, all the services that are necessary for them. And then the features and functions that are needed for website creation, commerce, and enabling our photographers to do what they do best, which is take photos, and get those photos out to their prospects to their customers as quickly as possible. And, and to help them grow their business in general. So, you know, that's, that's my role.

Gary Pageau  2:06  
So we're here to discuss a new survey that you've released, talking about the impact of COVID on photographers, but this isn't the first of these type market surveys released to the industry. Can you talk a little bit about why Zenfolio is a conducting these surveys and then sharing the results so widely to everyone?

Pamela Vachon  2:26  
Absolutely. You know, this started, you know, back in early, I think late winter of 2021. And we were trying to understand the impact we'd seen. We were riding this roller coaster of COVID of things are open, things are closed, people are having photos people aren't. So we conducted one in the late winter, we followed it up with one in the spring, because we had seen such a shift. We've seen such a surge in E commerce activity, we really wanted to understand both for our business, but also for our photographers, businesses. So how are they adapting? Can we educate photographers on what other photographers are doing to be successful during these really kind of tumultuous times? And this with this latest survey, we really expanded the questions because we were all hopeful that that one day kind of COVID is maybe not behind us, but maybe just kind of like part of our normal operating environment. But we want to start understanding things more about gear and what types of clients they have and how their clients find them so that we can then disseminate that information and provide education to photographers that are out there or up and coming photographers,

Gary Pageau  3:34  
how was the survey conducted?

Pamela Vachon  3:38  
So we, we did the survey in a few parts. We did this through our Zenfolio newsletters, our format newsletters, our format is the company in Canada that we purchased in November. And I believe we also did football partnership for the survey is

Gary Pageau  4:01  
when we tried to reach beyond the Zenfolio customer base.

Pamela Vachon  4:06  
We really wanted to the first couple of surveys kind of ended up being really centralized on the Zenfolio customer base. And we wanted to make sure that we were expanding beyond that. There are people outside of the kind of the wedding and portrait and you know some of the school and sports photography genres that we really want to reach and understand those as well.

Gary Pageau  4:23  
So according to the recap I'm seeing here you've got about 3400 photographers, that's pretty good. That's a pretty decent sized sample for a survey like this. Tell us a little bit about the first and second surveys you've done kind of what were the major elements you learned from that and how you've acted on them. Maybe that's a Keith question in terms of what you've learned from that how you've incorporated some of those things into Zenfolio. So far, the surveys

Keith Barraclough  4:46  
really helped us focus on what was going to help bring the photographer's back as quickly as possible right in and you know, we during the COVID period we were also midway through building out a new platform that has been servicing our photographers. So, you know, in some ways we had that, I wouldn't say luxury, but at least that ability to take in this information and look carefully about how we launched the new tiers of service, and how we would, you know, focus them around where the growth was going to come. And from what we what we saw was obviously, total downturn in wedding and event photography. And this year, we saw a projection, which we are seeing in real time going on right now, where weddings and higher volume event photography is growing rapidly. And, you know, our our stats are showing us that our product is actually performing right now at near peak season levels, even though we are you know, much earlier than we would normally be in, in the seasonality of weddings and high volume photography. So, for us, we were able to say, okay, what are the things that are going to help differentiate this, this wave as it comes back? And in the meantime, you know, what could we do to support the photographers, while they were waiting for the wedding season to actually start, you know, a year later. And we did, we did a lot of work around supporting portrait photographers and helping them, you know, we we actually and Pam can talk to us a little more, we had all sorts of interesting scenarios where photographers, were finding new and interesting ways to engage in a COVID safe way, in taking everything from family photos on porches, where they were literally safely distanced. And we were then trying to make sure that we, you know, we were supporting portraiture, as we were rolling out the new platform, and, you know, passing that information back to the photographers to give them ideas to inspire them, on how they could continue to shoot and find ways to make their business work during COVID. So it was, it was a good thing for us to take a step back and look at how we were going to support them as they came out and then prioritize features a little bit to help that.

Gary Pageau  7:07  
Sure. So Pam, can you talk a little bit about that what Keith brought up?

Pamela Vachon  7:14  
Sure. So um, you know, some of the things that we were looking at with, with supporting these photographers, way in the early times, when they when pretty much everybody was just hunkered down in their homes, capitalizing on people missing their family and wanting to look back at old memories was a really big thing. So making, you know, those old archived images available for sale again, and people having the opportunity to purchase again, kind of really helps bolster photographers while they weren't actively shooting, making sure that our booking and calendaring service was primed and ready to go, when this wedding boom happened is hugely critical. Because now these photographers are getting, I mean, you've seen the articles talking about this year is a wedding boom that we've never seen before. And so making sure that photographers are ready to kind of accept that business, get that scheduled, and you know, then seamlessly deliver the images and sell at the print Labs was, you know, really critical for the success of these photographers for this summer and fall.

Gary Pageau  8:24  
I really think the COVID pandemic, which you know, technically we're still in, but for the most part, most people are operating business as usual with, you know, different cases here and there. But the difference I think, is it really it like he said, it gave photographers themselves time to reevaluate their businesses, and many of them like you said, Did port shoots and maybe expanded into different types of photography, like I've heard of, you know, portrait divers, and they started doing travel in nature because we started building up their stock portfolios and started looking at different ways they could adapt their business. Do you think that behaviors in a carry on because one thing I've suspected is that COVID is a game changer in the sense that kicked some people in the butt that if they weren't online and mobile, they had to get their right to reach people? And now they're going to stay there? They're not going to go back?

Keith Barraclough  9:17  
Yeah, I would say you know, we saw different genres that saw growth, right. One was food services, and food shoots. And you know, food delivery services went through the roof, right because of COVID. They're not going backwards, you know, that that business is here to stay. So therefore visual representation of your menu really important for online services. So we saw growth in that segment. You know, we were going to continue to see the digital delivery is just paramount for for everything now. We've seen zoom to come as part of wedding packages. You know, we We've seen video not just in the traditional sense of the wedding video, but the sharing of the experience real time and after the experience to a distributed audience has now become a part of wedding packages. So yeah, the COVID has changed things in a way that you know, and that's accelerated things, I would say, to your point, Gary, where, you know, mobile is everything now, you know, mobile consumption of the photographer's products is, is significantly higher than it's ever been before we saw it boom, again, with COVID. And you know, that one of the reasons we built a new platform was for the, you know, the delivery to end consumers on mobile devices is critical. And that's never gonna go backwards. That's going to continue forwards now.

Gary Pageau  10:48  
Pam, do you want to jump on that?

Pamela Vachon  10:50  
Yeah, I mean, also the acceleration of trends that we already saw, such as selling digital downloads, yeah, you're definitely seeing an acceleration of that. I think that print will never go away. And I think that people saw that when they when they were missing their family, and they couldn't see them, prints were a big way to have something tangible, to remind them of family members that they may be worth seeing. But at the same time, we saw this, you know, even bigger acceleration of, of digital delivery of, of images,

Gary Pageau  11:23  
well, and people just had time on their hands, to be honest. I mean, we saw that on the consumer part of the segment where a lot of the consumer brands just Shutterfly's, a snap fishes, and those folks encourage people make photo books, which as we all know, is a very time consuming can can be a laborious process. And people had time on their hands to do it. They actually book volume took a little uptick during that period. That's part of the process, too. So let's, so let's talk a little bit about the survey itself. You know, one of the things I thought was very interesting was the revenue report, not surprisingly, looking at on page three of that report, right now, you had people who obviously saw a big downturn, right, 20 to 40% or more, but you also saw some people who stayed the same and increase? No, not the same percentage. But what were some of the characteristics of those who saw increases?

Pamela Vachon  12:16  
So I think that some of the people who saw increases were the people who were adaptable they could they, first off, we had some, some small numbers of people who sold art, landscape and nature have increases, because, you know, people were sitting there staring at the same four walls of their home. And, you know, perhaps one of the redex. Part time photographers, I think, in some ways took a hit, I think maybe they, they were already they didn't have quite the going marketing and customer base that the full time photographers had. But, you know, the people that were successful were the ones who could make a pivot that could pivot into the real estate space that could pivot into the food photography space, that could be open to the idea of delivering your images in a way that they typically had. So maybe they moved away from the person sales, and decided to go with an online platform, such as in folio or, or format. So I think being adaptable and being able to pivot were some of the real big characteristics of people who kind of were able to make COVID work in a way that was beneficial for them.

Keith Barraclough  13:28  
And across the board, I think we saw commercial growing. As you know, we're relatively right to the other segments. And I think we saw photographers taking on a couple of different shoot types, you know, typically one to two types. But, you know, commercial was something that didn't go away. And as Pam said, real estate definitely didn't go away. I mean, we've just come through a whole boom there and online. Real estate sales have gone through the roof. Right. So that that also sort of added to another element that was getting, you know, we already had a fair number of real estate photographers, I think we've seen it that's been an uptick.

Gary Pageau  14:08  
And honestly, with real estate photos, you don't want people in them. So it makes it makes for good.

Keith Barraclough  14:15  
And with Yeah, all their relative showings and limitations on that having the visual representation online was critical

Gary Pageau  14:22  
in terms of generating revenue. What were some of the breakdowns where people were making money, you know, prints downloads, marketplace type activity, so where's that shaking out these days?

Keith Barraclough  14:35  
All like I would say across the board, you know, commerce both digital and physical is looking very strong for us. We've we've added more labs, we've added more products we continue to we continue to see high demand from our photographers to add broader sets of products with more variety from lab capabilities. I you know that that has So the the idea that you can have a seamless checkout experience on a mobile device, that that sort of goes hand in hand with having these labs available and you know, being one to two touches away from a purchase. So we've we've seen that grow, we're seeing Commerce on on our new platform do very, very well. And that demand, I can only see going up from here, both in the digital and the physical space. So again, it comes comes back a little bit to what you were saying, Gary, people with with a little bit of time, and now moving into, you know, a wedding season where lots of people are sharing, and they're on their couch in the evening, and they decide they want to purchase, and we're giving them better facilities to do that from the phone, then they're not going to go to the desktop to do that, from a consumer perspective.

Gary Pageau  15:51  
You know, one of the things I think that is super advantageous for this process, the fact that so much of this friction has been reduced, you know, getting a print made now at a pro lab through a service like yours, or someone else's, is now virtually seamless where it didn't used to be, it was a download, upload, and if people don't want to deal with them, so I think reducing the friction is probably the secret sauce to a lot of this uptick.

Keith Barraclough  16:23  
Absolutely. And I think also making it easy for the photographers to set this up as well, right. So there's friction on both sides. So building, you know, building tools, intelligent tools to help them build price lists, allowing them to, you know, easily select a set of products that can be displayed to the consumer, that isn't a raft of things, but it's just the target for what they're selling for a particular shoe type. Making all those things linked to the shoe type. Those are the things that we've been investing in and trying to bring some intelligence into the platform so that when you're on that mobile device, from a consumer perspective, you've got the right set of choices, but it's not overwhelming, we're not asking you to do anything that would slow down that commerce activity. And to be frank, it's showing in the results that we're seeing.

Gary Pageau  17:12  
Now Pim, you're in the role of having to communicate all these wonderful benefits to the for diver customers, is that been a challenge, because you you really asked them to do a lot more on your platform to run their business, you're really becoming more of a full featured CRM environment almost.

Pamela Vachon  17:35  
Right. And it does, you know, adding, you know, adding features and adding functionality, you know, it, it makes it difficult, because we have a very brief amount of time in front of these photographers to communicate what it is we can do and how you know, how we can do that. And I think, focusing on what the benefit is to them and their clients and really turning it to, you know, how are they going? How are their clients going to love what they, you know, what their website provides to the client. And, you know, it's, as Keith talked about, with, with using AI and introducing some of these, these workflow capabilities. reducing friction for the clients really ends up being something that makes the photographer ultimately more successful. For instance, the online booking capability, we had a photographer tell us that this couple had a had a baby born, the husband was in the hospital. And he's like, Oh, well, we want to have newborn photos done. We didn't we didn't get this taken care of. And he was on photographer websites. And he went with this one photographer who had his in folio site, because he, he's on his mobile phone in the hospital room and could click, and he was able to choose the time and communicate with them. And it was all done. Whereas, you know, other ones that he was trying to vet, you know, it was involving emails and phone calls, and back and forth, and he's trying to enjoy his new baby in the moment. And so really reducing that friction is, you know, really helping to push people through the buying process for these photographers and ultimately giving them that sale that they want.

Gary Pageau  19:10  
Because I mean, I've been following you know, Zenfolio for a lot of years, and really, you know, when you guys were first in the marketplace, who was like, there was the place for gorgeous galleries, you wanted to see a beautiful gallery Zenfolio was your place, but seems like you've been adding a lot of more of like some more of the back end support features.

Keith Barraclough  19:29  
Yeah, I think the the idea that we can help the photographer, look, they are generating a sea of images these days, where we're helping them organize, and then be selective in how they want to present them to the consumer because the consumer doesn't want to see the sea of images necessarily. They want to see the really great ones and then they want to do something with them from their mobile phone. So what were you're seeing us do and why you will see us do it. is helping the photographers get their images online as quickly as possible, help helping them organize or potentially even, you know, rank and select from those images. So giving them you know, helping them with some intelligence so that they can start to figure out what they should be showing versus what they shouldn't should giving them the intelligent to say how to price these things, how to price the products that sit around those images. And then, you know, starting to help them find them. That's the other thing. You know, we've we've been a pioneer in search for a long time as folio, we've had search on our platform for a very long time. You know, now the thing is, how do you add intelligence behind that search, so that you can have not only the photographer the images they want, but the end consumer find the images they want. And let's let's look at it, candidly searches what a lot of people use on their mobile device right now, right, so you can see it in the product today, you know, we have this idea of facial filtering, where you can say, you know, this person, show me all the pictures of this person in the gallery, so that I can find, you know, that person at a wedding a person in a particular group shot. That's, that's the kind of thing that you need, in order to get that friction down, have an actionable event, if they want to take a print, if they want to download, and more importantly, just to give a great experience for the photographer to engage with their clients.

Pamela Vachon  21:26  
Keith, you brought up an interesting point about, you know, photographers, and pricing and the dynamic dynamic pricing. Yeah. When we did the survey, you know, and we looked at photographers and their employment status, it really seems, you know, hobbyists and students, they're starting out for the art. And that's why these photographers are starting, they love the art and the, you know, the creation of the images. And the more their income relies on their photography, oh, you see a lot of them moving away from it, you know, granted, there are some photographers who can, you know, keep in, you know, in the arts and the landscape and the nature and they can make it successful, but a lot of them are having to move. And as they're moving across these different genres, one of the biggest questions our customer success group gets, isn't how do I do XY and Z on my website? It's, How do I, what do I sell my work for? What What should I be selling for, and being able to, you know, generate this, and provide that kind of a good starting point for these photographers, using AI and using some of this is really important. And it's going to be key for these photographers being successful as they, as they go through their journey,

Gary Pageau  22:35  
because pricing is one of those areas that is fraught with peril for a lot of businesses, and especially in a service business, right? Because you certainly don't want to lowball your services, just to get business because you're leaving money on the table. But you also don't want to go out of the reach of your potential customers, because you're trying to capture that premium spot, because that premium spot is always moving. Right? And you know, in some markets, a $5,000 wedding is typical. And in other spots, it's not at all.

Keith Barraclough  23:09  
Yeah, and we've seen that, you know, as well, once you start getting to packages, right, so one of the things that we brought to play in our new platform is the idea that you can put together wedding packages with, you know, a certain set of physical, digital other services, then how do you price those? How do you how do you make sure that you're giving exactly the sweet spot for the market, you're going after, in the zip code you're in? And I think that that's, that's been seen as a real opportunity to help photographers one get off the ground, and to grow their business.

Gary Pageau  23:44  
You know, you talk a little bit of talk a little bit about diversifying, you know, in different types of photography, but I'm also seeing a little bit of dialogue about photographers diversifying away from photography itself, like getting into DJ services, and some of the other stuff kind of being a whole now as a party planner, but sort of that sort of thing. How do you think that's a trend? Or is that sort of a desperate grasp or revenue?

Keith Barraclough  24:07  
I would say the area that we've seen some growth is around video and video services coming alongside photography and and you know, we we've, we've been delivering video on our older platform for a while we reintroduced it with some some new features on the new platform recently the chair you know, things like being able to apply watermarking to videos and things, things that sort of apply well to someone as an event photography business, adding video to that. And you know, we did ask in the survey, you know, how many people are doing video we're seeing a growth there, how many people are doing it themselves as opposed to hiring a third party they were less forthcoming maybe on that particular piece. Some information, but but we are starting to see that as an opportunity. And again, this comes back to how they package and sell, and whether video becomes an important part of that service. You know, I think in prior years, we've seen it sort of being thrown in as a sort of, it's a bonus feature, right now it's becoming an expectation. And you know, the quality is expected to go up, we're seeing drones at weddings, we're seeing Ray, you've seen all this area, right. So where that fits, and how that starts to fit together as part of an overall business, I think is something that we were really, really looking at carefully. And as we build out video services to help our photographers, that's an important part.

Gary Pageau  25:42  
You mentioned drones, that was something else that I've been hearing more and more about. And it's that's a whole nother level of craziness, I think from a standpoint of, you know, just being in a venue and having this thing flying overhead making noise. And it just anyway, like you said, it appeared to be what people are looking for, it does seem to me that elaborate wedding capture doesn't seem to be going away, I remember the trash the dress trend from a few years ago, and now it's into, you know, capture that moment and have a bunch of stage things. It's it's the elaborate wedding photography was not going away.

Keith Barraclough  26:21  
It's not and you know, the other reason video is becoming important is because of the social sharing, right? I mean, everyone wants to share everything, socially, images, a great video is also an important part of that and giving that in a nutshell moment for the social sharing is becoming an important part of what a photographer does for their clients. Is that is that is the way they they interact. And what we see is Instagram is a huge part of how photography I found how to share and you know, building social interaction into the platform has been a really high priority for us going forward.

Gary Pageau  26:58  
Now, Pam, from a marketing standpoint, isn't video pretty much a requirement? Like Keith was saying for Instagram and everything else? I mean, isn't what are you doing to support the photographers who are doing video? But are you providing like do's and don'ts and that sort of thing? What sort of customer support are you providing?

Pamela Vachon  27:19  
So our support team and success team is always happy to you know, to work with photographers one on one and talk to them about the do's and don'ts. You know, we haven't bridge too far into the photography and videography, 101 space, because there's a there's a lot of there, it's a great thing to add in. We do talk about things like you know, best practices for including video and your galleries, best practices for selling videos, and that sort of thing. And then our own marketing department is obviously using video to communicate with photographers and clients alike. Because like Keith said, that is the way people are consuming their their media now, we see a lot of still images, but you see a lot more of the Instagram reels and a lot of tick tock and, you know, a lot of people want to they want to understand what's the benefit of a feature? Or how do I use a feature, a lot of people want to see those, those videos, so including them in both our marketing, product marketing, and our product is just critical.

Gary Pageau  28:26  
Excuse me, like video is not going away from a delivery standpoint, I think it's kind of interesting, because, you know, unlike a physical print or a download, you know, you gotta have something to play it on. And I just wonder if it's gonna stay on your service, and people have to keep that live forever, or you're gonna have to have them download it, and they have to store it, or I think that's gonna be pretty interesting to see how that shakes out.

Keith Barraclough  28:48  
Yeah, and, you know, we've obviously with with joining a format Zenfolio as well, we've seen, you know, video is an important part of that platform as well, and showcasing video and, you know, some of the templates that have been developed on that platform have been, you know, actually quite inspirational for things we can do back on Zenfolio as well. So, yeah, huge opportunity. They're growing at a, you know, a fair clip. And, like I said, with, with social being such an important part it it's part of it's part and parcel of what has to come.

Gary Pageau  29:23  
I think one of the things that surprised a lot of people coming out of COVID is just how optimistic and gung ho people seem to be about the future of the industry. Especially like in the volume photography, space, the school photography, people are very optimist even though there was no school for a lot of them. They were managed to, you know, change their processes and adapt and wedding photographers because even though there are no weddings, they were changed their bra. So I'm really sensing a lot of optimism and growth opportunities for the industry going forward.

Pamela Vachon  29:59  
Absolutely. And you know, whether it was weddings or whether it was dance, school and sports, what a lot of these photographers saw is if they could kind of weather those kind of rocky times, the consumers have a lot of demand. And when when things open back up, consumers have said loud and clear that these types of things are really important. It's important to them to have photos of them at that marathon, it's important for photo photo and video of their child's dance recital. These things are very important to people in as soon as, you know, restrictions eased. And these types of events started up, consumers had a very high demand for it. So I think that's really fueling a lot of that optimism.

Gary Pageau  30:39  
No, I agree, I would say that, that kind of maybe reinforce the idea just how important photography is. And it's not just, you know, everyone's got a camera phone, so no one's gonna want the professional photography, I think that's actually been proven wrong. Before we close, can you give us a little bit update on kind of where Zenfolio is at and kind of some of the latest innovations and where it's going to be going in the near future?

Keith Barraclough  31:03  
Well, I think we touched on some of it, what you're going to see is us doing everything we can to help the photographer and that workflow. And that that comes you know, recently, we've been adding new high volume tools so that photographers can upload with more ease providing desktop applications to integrate with our, with our service, you're gonna see us adding more intelligence, so that they can more readily access the best image as quickly as possible, highlight it in the best way to consumer, and then tell them about it, right. I mean, the CRM functions, the outreach functions, though, the way that a photographer can, can grow their business, understand who's trying to reach them, who's engaging with them, giving them analytics that sits behind that, so that they know where they're being successful, how they're being successful. Those are the things you know, they they may sound dull, but they yield such an important factor when you are out there, doing your own digital marketing, when we're helping them do their digital marketing. And then giving them that end in client experience that is great on mobile, I mean, those things all tied together, it's it's an expectation level, it's, you know, let's let's be candid, there's there's been a move to digital marketing Zenfolio has changed in the last four years, from being you know, a company that has a FaceTime, real FaceTime, not the FaceTime, digital product, with, with photographers, to a company that has to digitally market and reaches photographers and help them understand better, you know, our investment in video is because we have to help them on a broader reach with with digital marketing than we've ever had to do before. The same thing applies to the photographers, they have to be able to do that they have to have the tools to do that. That's what we're going to do. And, you know, I would say the other trend that everyone sees is more images are captured, right, the growth in actual number of images that are captured, is is continuing and handling those images and helping photographers get through all those images that are the expectation that you know, you didn't miss the shots when you're at a wedding. So you take every shot. Now you've got to help them find their way through every shot to find the shots that actually go into the gallery that go to their prospective clients. That's what we're that's what we will do same with, you know, team sports, same with dance competitions, helping them get their product into the hands of their clients as easily as possible. And then giving the delight at the end that the right images are there. And they're served well on a mobile device. I mean, it's it all sounds obvious, but takes a lot of pieces to make that one.

Gary Pageau  33:59  
Yeah, that's, that's a lot of dots to connect. Pam. Yeah,

Pamela Vachon  34:02  
you know, leveraging the things that our marketing team knows about email marketing, and promotions, and all of that, and kind of giving photographers some best practices and some tools, the product team has given us some great tools, you're going to see more of that, you know, automated campaigns, automated ways to, you know, communicate to your customers that there are, you know, this is a, this is a promotion time, you know, go back and revisit your gallery and maybe buy those extra prints for the distant relatives, making sure that there's great personalization in those types of communications because when the customer opens up the email and it's got the image of their kid from last weekend's photoshoot. They're more likely to really open and read that than if it was, you know, something a little bit more generic, you know, bland and tight based. Yeah. So, you know, really leveraging some of that stuff. And, you know, and I've worked with our photographers for 10 years and they're They're not always, you know, taught classically about business, and they're not always well versed about business and business practices and giving them the education and the tools to help their business be successful. And let them do the part that they really know about, which is, you know, taking the photographs and working with the clients, you know, that kind of one, that relationship building, kind of marrying those two and kind of, you know, giving them that full toolkit is, is what we'll be focusing on.

Gary Pageau  35:25  
Yeah, cuz it's interesting how many people get into a field that they're passionate about whether it's photography or baking or something, then they have to discover they have to do all that other stuff, then that's either a wake up call or a disincentive. So hopefully, you're continuing to make it easier for photographers to grow their businesses. Well, thank you, Pam and Keith, for your time. Where can people go if they don't know by now to get more information on Zenfolio

Pamela Vachon  35:55  
can go to www.zenfolio.com.

Gary Pageau  35:59  
Okay, well, thank you folks for your time and looking forward to hopefully seeing you in person at some of the upcoming industry events, and have a great week.

Erin Manning  36:11  
Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www the dead pixels society.com

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