Welcome to Summer PhotoDay Fest 2023—SPF 23, for short. The PhotoDay Team is releasing exciting developments over the next few months, so we wanted to create a new way to celebrate and share all of the summer fun. First up: our brand new customer gallery!
Introducing Galleries 4!
We are thrilled to announce the release of Galleries 4—our latest and greatest version of PhotoDay Galleries. The team has been working hard to research, implement, and innovate the entire Galleries experience while carefully listening to and incorporating feedback from volume photography studios using PhotoDay—and it’s now officially released into the wild!
After significant development efforts across all departments, we’re ready to share the exciting details about our new, innovative gallery and shopping experience. It’s now easier than ever for your customers to find, customize, and order their photos. But, the developments don’t stop there! Did we mention we’re also expanding your studio branding options? We have a lot to cover!
Keep reading to learn more about how Galleries 4 provides enhanced speed and security, upgraded customer experience, customizable branding, and more.
Mobile-Friendly & Lightning Fast
Through our research, we determined that a whopping 88% of all PhotoDay orders were placed on mobile devices. This means that the large majority of our active shoppers are accessing their galleries and placing orders through their phone’s web browser. For this reason, Galleries 4 is thoughtfully designed to be mobile-first, but still computer-friendly, of course, because everyone deserves a top-notch experience.
One of the biggest and most exciting changes is that Galleries 4 is now a Progressive Web Application—PWA for short. PWAs deliver a refined app-like experience without needing to download an actual app. It can be viewed right in your mobile or desktop web browser and automatically adjusts for any device’s screen size. The result? Galleries 4 is highly responsive, 4x faster than the typical e-commerce portal, and even more secure than HTTPS.
With this foundation, the entire customer gallery experience was rebuilt from the ground up to maximize customer engagement and increase conversions and overall sales. This brings us to the marketing updates!
Direct, Hassle-Free Access
With Galleries 4, all three gallery types can now be shared and accessed through deep links. Deep links are a type of link that sends users directly to specific locations. To put it simply, PhotoDay’s deep links provide a frictionless way for parents already subscribed to the gallery to access their photos—without getting lost in the process of re-entering an access code.
The direct, deep links are shared through all of PhotoDay’s built-in communications, including smart text marketing, manual flyers, and automatic email campaigns. Studios can also use the gallery deep link in their own marketing outside of the PhotoDay platform. By clicking the link shared in those communications, your opted-in customers can enter their galleries without entering their access code and without sacrificing security, making it a win-win for everyone!
While this capability is already available for public galleries in PhotoDay, we’re ecstatic to introduce it to group and private gallery types! This direct linking system significantly improves the user experience by enabling customers to access their galleries twice as fast. Additionally, when a studio changes a gallery’s status from AdvancePay to Published, accessing the correct gallery will be easier than ever.
Gallery deep links will be shared with customers through PhotoDay’s text (SMS) marketing, manual flyers, and automatic email campaigns. We hope you’re ready for fewer “I lost my access code” messages!
Secure & Seamless Customer Onboarding
Now you can know exactly who is viewing their galleries! To enter a gallery and view their photos, all customers must first create an account, meaning they will no longer have the option to checkout as an anonymous guest. Having each customer create an individual account not only bolsters security but also paves the way for robust future updates and marketing developments.
Additionally, studios using private galleries have the ability to send targeted marketing emails to subjects who have either viewed or not viewed their gallery, as well as those who have not purchased photos from their gallery—even if they have viewed it.
When creating their accounts, customers can opt-in to further communications—such as text and email campaigns—to be compliant with TCPA and CAN-SPAM. This flow is not only respectful to your customers but safer, too, by allowing each subject to be associated with a parent/guardian/responsible party.
Overall, we’re excited about how much this customer onboarding step will improve opt-in rates—making communication with your customers that much easier. If you haven’t caught on already, that’s what PhotoDay is all about: creating simplified, elevated experiences for you and your customers.
Showcase Your Studio Branding
Keep your unique studio branding front and center in Galleries 4! As highly requested by PhotoDay users, studio names are now included in the gallery’s header. Along with the studio name, any uploaded job logos will also be displayed in the header of each gallery. Studios can choose to make the job logo their own business logo to level up their brand awareness.
This fresh design not only solidifies your studio’s identity and builds brand recognition for your customers, but it also differentiates studio galleries from one another. Rest assured that if another photographer is also using PhotoDay, you can feel confident that your galleries will be visually distinct to the end-shopper. You worked hard on that logo, so why not let it shine?
Filter & Search Intentionally
As you photograph the same schools, leagues, events, etc. season after season, you’re bound to have wonderful repeat customers. With Galleries 4, those customers can easily sort the gallery list to view their most recent photos first.
If a customer has opted into multiple galleries, they are now listed chronologically from the most recently published. This is a dream for those repeat clients and customers! We also added sorting options so galleries can be filtered alphabetically and by publish date, making it effortless to access older galleries (and encouraging passive income).
We also streamlined the tag search process. Tags in PhotoDay are an easy way for studios to add structure and organization to their group and public photo galleries. Using tags (e.g. team name, age group, picture day date, etc.) allows customers to filter their searches and find their photos quickly. We enhanced this process, so customers can now search for tags without needing to scroll through a list. Tags can also be selected and stacked to further optimize their search efforts! Because life is way sweeter without aimless scrolling.
The All-New Favoriting Workflow
We completely revamped the way customers select their favorite photos to purchase—making the customization and checkout process faster and more intuitive than ever. It’s a total game-changer for the gallery experience.
To get started, customers will tap to favorite their photos in the gallery before moving on to the rest of the shopping experience (where they can select products and print sizes, choose themes, customize text, etc.). Customers can also “Favorite All” to make proceeding to the shopping cart a breeze. In group or public galleries, customers can favorite all once they’ve narrowed down their search through tags or FaceFind; in private galleries, customers can favorite all photos in their gallery with one click.
Choosing their favorite photos at the beginning of the shopping experience prevents customers from needing to return to the main gallery to search for other favorite poses. And if Instagram has taught us anything, it’s that everyone loves tapping hearts. ❤️
A Transformed Storefront Experience
Last but not least, the Galleries 4 storefront has been transformed to be more user-friendly, organized, customizable, and all-around streamlined. And we might be biased, but it’s also quite pretty. Here are some of the highlights:
- Package descriptions are now displayed clearly, and in a new pop-up, customers can get a quick view of the package contents. This alleviates having to open the package fully, then go back to compare it with the rest of the package offerings.
- Products are organized into fully searchable categories, allowing for efficient picking without scrolling.
- The customization process for both individual images and packages has been intuitively refined. After selecting a package or an à la carte product, the all-new Product Customizer appears, allowing customers to quickly adjust their photo choice, custom text, and graphic themes on their products.
- The Product Customizer especially shines when customizing products included in a package.
- Retouching is available right from within the customizer, as well, making it more visible and accessible than ever before.
- The checkout section has also been revised for optimal efficiency. If a customer wants to, they can make final adjustments and edit their products right from within the shopping cart.
But don’t just take our word for it! We’d love for you to take a look around one of our sample galleries to get the full customer experience. This new gallery experience exists at my.photoday.com, so we recommend updating your marketing materials to reflect the updated address!
Text LMDEMO23 to 90738 to experience our text message marketing and receive a link to see the new Galleries 4 in action.
Prefer not to text? Just go to https://my.photoday.com/ and enter LMDEMO23 or click this direct link.
The release of Galleries 4 is an exciting and significant step forward in PhotoDay's mission to provide the best experience possible for our studios and their customers. Not only does Galleries 4 make for a quicker and easier shopping experience, but it also provides valuable tools to promote your studio's brand and improve your overall sales and engagement.
Galleries 4 is out now! Sign up for a free PhotoDay account and create your first job today. If you’d like some help getting started, our Customer Success team is ready to guide you through the process. Onboarding is always free and fast—we’ll have you set up and selling in no time!
For current PhotoDay users, all galleries published or in AdvancePay mode before 7/5/23 will not be affected at this time and will remain on galleries.photoday.io. Starting 7/5/23, all new jobs and galleries in PhotoDay can be accessed on my.photoday.com.
Stay tuned to learn what other exciting releases we have in store for SPF 23!
