Black Friday is two weeks away. If you’ve been thinking about running a little sale this year, you still have just enough time to do it well.

And it doesn’t have to be complicated. Your past clients already love their photos, and many of them are shopping for gifts right now. A print of their family, their wedding day, or their dog is something they can’t buy in any store.

So let’s keep it simple. Below is an easy sale you can run from your own website, whether you shoot weddings, families, events, portraits, or a bit of everything.

Most of it runs on the store built into Imagely Pro, so the sale lives on your site and the money goes to you.

Plan Your Photography Black Friday Sale With Two Weeks to Go

Two weeks is plenty of time for a good sale. One clear offer tends to sell better than five small ones, because most people decide quickly whether an email is for them.

Black Friday falls on November 27 this year and Cyber Monday on November 30. That gives you a natural window: open the sale on Friday and keep it going through Cyber Monday.

Here are the five things I’d sort out this week, before you write a single promo email:

• Pick the offer you’ll lead with. A percentage off prints, a gift card with a bonus, or a mini session deal. Choose one to put front and center.
• Choose the galleries you’ll promote. Decide which client galleries you’ll point people to, and make sure each one has a pricelist attached.
• Test your checkout yourself. Buy a digital download from one of your own galleries, so nothing gets sent to the print lab, then refund the order. You’ll find any problem before a client does.
• Set an “order by” date. Work out how long printing and shipping take, and pick the last day an order can still arrive before the holidays.
• Plan how people will hear about it. An email to past clients, a couple of social posts, and a banner or popup on your website. There’s more on that last one further down.

Once those five are settled, the rest of this guide is just putting the pieces in place.

Create a Black Friday Coupon Code for Your Photo Store

A coupon code is the easiest way to run a sale without touching a single price. Your regular pricing stays exactly as it is, and only the people who have the code get the discount.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Imagely > eCommerce > Coupons and click Add New Coupon. The Create New Coupon window asks for a few details:

• Coupon For: a short name so you can find it later, like “Black Friday Print Sale.”
• Coupon Code: what clients type at checkout, like BLACKFRIDAY20.
• Discount Type and Discount Value: a percentage off or a flat amount off, and how much.
• Start Date and End Date: when the code works. An empty start date means it starts right away, and an empty end date means it never expires.
• Usage Limit: how many times the code can be used in total. Leave it empty for unlimited use.

The end date is what turns a code into a real Black Friday sale. Once it passes, the code stops working on its own, so there’s nothing to switch off by hand. In the example above, the end date is Tuesday, December 1, so the code is sure to work all day on Cyber Monday.

Clients enter the code in the coupon field at checkout. If you don’t see that field on your checkout page, go to Imagely > eCommerce > Other Options and make sure Hide coupons on checkout is turned off.

After the sale, the Times Used column on the Coupons tab shows how many times each code was redeemed. The Orders tab has a Coupon column too, so you can see exactly which orders the sale brought in.

Sell Holiday Prints in Your Black Friday Sale

Prints are the classic holiday gift. A family wants their portrait on the wall at Grandma’s, a couple wants a wedding print for each set of parents, and a business wants its team photo framed for the office.

With Imagely’s automated print fulfillment, paid print orders are sent to WHCC, a professional print lab, which prints them and ships them to your client. You don’t need your own WHCC account, and Imagely takes no commission on your sales while your Pro license is active.

Prints can ship to clients in the US, Canada, the EU, and the UK, and your store needs to be set to US dollars for print lab orders. If some of your clients live abroad, check your shipping settings before the sale.

Your client pays the price you set, and you pay the lab’s cost from the card saved in your PrintLab Integration settings. The difference is yours.

You set your prices in a pricelist, then attach it to a gallery so every photo in it is for sale at once. The pricelist editor shows what each print costs you right next to what you charge.

That side-by-side view is worth a look before you choose a discount. A percentage code takes the same share off every size, but a flat-amount code bites hardest on your smallest prints, so check those before you pick a number.

Timing is the other thing to plan for. Production and shipping can take longer close to the holidays, so put your “order by” date in your sale email and on the gallery page, where clients can’t miss it.

If you’d rather work with your own lab, you can add manual products instead, such as prints, canvas, metal, acrylic, or wood, and fulfill those orders yourself.

Offer Digital Downloads as a Black Friday Deal

Digital downloads are the fastest thing you can sell, because there’s nothing to print and nothing to ship. That makes them the perfect last-minute gift once your print deadline has passed.

To add one, open your pricelist, click Add New Product, and choose Digital Downloads. Give the product a name, set a price, and fill in the Longest Image Dimension. Enter 0 to sell the full-size file.

Two sizes tend to work well side by side: a smaller file for sharing online and a full-size file for printing at home. You can also offer downloads for free, which is a nice way to add value to a gallery without discounting your prints.

Downloads suit wedding and event galleries especially well. Guests and family members often want the file rather than the frame, and they can buy it right from the gallery.

Your watermark can stay on the gallery, too. Imagely’s Sell from Originals feature removes watermarks and customizations from the photos people buy, so buyers get a clean file.

Turn Holiday Mini Sessions Into Black Friday Print Orders

Holiday mini sessions are short sessions booked back to back: families in matching sweaters, dogs in reindeer antlers, a quick round of headshots before the new year. The session is where the sale starts, not where it ends.

Book them the way you always do. Where your website really helps is the delivery, because that’s the moment clients decide how much to order.

Put each client’s photos in their own gallery with proofing turned on and your pricelist attached. Clients star their favorites in the lightbox, send you their picks, and order prints from the same gallery. If you haven’t set one up before, here’s how to set up a client gallery for online proofing.

Then send each gallery with a short deadline and a coupon that ends on the same day. A deadline gives clients a reason to order now instead of “sometime after the holidays.”

This works for any short session, not only families. Pet portraits, branding sessions, and holiday headshots all end the same way: a gallery, a deadline, and a reason to order today.

One small tip: send the gallery while the session is still fresh. A few days after the shoot, people are still excited about the photos, and that excitement is what fills a cart.

Sell Photography Gift Cards for Black Friday

Gift cards are the easiest yes for someone shopping for a family member. They don’t have to pick a photo or a size, and you get a booked session in the new year, when many calendars are quieter.

Sell session gift cards the same way you take bookings and deposits today. Then feature them on your site and in your Black Friday email, ideally with a small bonus, like an extra print or a few more edited photos.

For a gift card your client can spend in your print store, a coupon does the job. Create a coupon with the Flat Amount discount type, set the value, for example $50, and set the Usage Limit to 1. The recipient enters the code at checkout and the amount comes off their order.

Because the code works only once, a value that fits a single order works best. Keep in mind that on lab prints you still pay the lab’s cost, so the gift comes out of your margin. Leave the end date empty, or set it far enough out that the gift doesn’t expire before it’s used.

Gift cards also give you something to sell after your print deadline. You can email the code yourself as late as Christmas Eve, which makes it a great last item in your final sale email.

Promote Your Black Friday Sale on Your Photography Website

Your past clients will hear about the sale by email. But plenty of people land on your website this time of year without being on your list, and they should see the sale the moment they arrive.

The simplest way is an announcement bar across the top of your site, with the offer, the code, and the end date. It stays out of the way while people browse, and it shows up on every page.

A popup works well on your gallery and shop pages, where people are already looking at photos they love. Keep it short: one headline, the code, and a button that takes them to your prints.

A popup can also collect email addresses. Offer early access to your sale, or a reminder before it ends, and you grow your list for next year at the same time.

A tool like OptinMonster can build both the bar and the popup, and you can schedule them to show only during your sale. That way they disappear on their own, just like your coupon.

And don’t forget your homepage. A short line near the top that points to your print shop helps anyone who closes the popup without reading it.

FAQs About Running a Photography Black Friday Sale

A Black Friday sale doesn’t need to be big to be worth it. One clear offer, a coupon with an end date, and galleries your clients already love will do most of the work. If you’re weighing where else to sell your work, be sure to check out our guide to the best places to sell photography online.

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