The whole premise of StudioDiva, Julian’s portrait business, is based around vouchers we give out to a variety of sources to find new clients and results in us shooting between 800-1000 portraits each year across our two studios. But expiry dates are crucial – in fact they’re the most important inclusion for your vouchers to work. If you don’t create a sense of urgency for a client to call up and book, they never will. We’ve all been given a voucher or gift card for Christmas that has an expiry date of a year, so we put it away somewhere safe and then ends up being forgotten and expires before we use it.

Our vouchers are valid for six weeks before they expire, but the actual photoshoot can be held anytime within the next three months after the expiry date – as long as the client has called up and booked beforehand. Quite frequently the urgency of our expiry dates has lead to this situation: Julian received a call on his mobile at five minutes to 8pm on a Saturday night by a voucher client whose voucher expired the next day. The answering machine at the studio clearly states “In the case of an extreme emergency, the director of the company can be contacted on his personal mobile.” It seems the client definitely believed their voucher expiring was an important emergency and wanted to speak to the director about it. Amazing!

Have you sent out vouchers for your business and what was the response?

Want to learn more tips and tricks to help your wedding photography business? Come to one of Julian’s seminars this October and November!