You’re posing in front of a photo booth. The flash goes off and you wait in anticipation as your photo appears on the screen. Excited to share your photo with your friends, you enter your phone number, tap “Send” and… nothing happens.
10 minutes later, you still haven’t received your photo.
What happens next? Best case scenario, you receive you photo later that day, while the event or location where you took your photo is still fresh in your mind. Worst case, you receive your photo several days later, while you’re at work and no longer thinking about that amazing photo you took.
Don’t let this situation happen to your photo booth. Here are four reasons why any delay in the sending (or receipt) of a photo from your photo booth is detrimental:
1. Decreased engagement
The longer it takes for someone to receive a photo, the less likely they are to share that photo to social media and/or with their friends. In fact, the longer it takes for someone to get their photo, the more likely they are to treat it as spam.
2. Decreased enthusiasm
The most excited a person will be about the reason they took their photo is in the 5 to 10 minutes immediately afterward. Much longer after that and any engagement they have with the photo starts to become more matter-of-fact. It’s the difference between “check out this awesome photo I took at INSERT EVENT HERE #eventHashtag” vs. “I took my photo at INSERT EVENT HERE”.
3. Missed opportunities
The magic of digital photos is that they can be delivered anywhere almost instantaneously and they can be easily shared to social media. If you’re doing a branded event, you can further incentivize sharing with a contest, giveaway, or something like an instagram hashtag board. All of these typically require engagement during the event, though, so getting someone’s photo to them as soon as possible is critical. With a planned delay in sending photos, you’ll completely miss out on these sorts of opportunities; and with any unplanned delay (e.g. technical issues), any contests or giveaways could be unfair.
4. Eroded reputation
In our instant gratification-oriented society, the expectation is that people will receive their photos immediately (or at least fairly quickly). Any delay reflects poorly on the company operating the photo booth (and sometimes on the event itself if it is more on the branded side). Word of mouth may not always be the highest-volume form of marketing, but it is by far the most trusted. Good word of mouth can bring your photo booth company enough business to sustain it for as long as you want, but bad word of mouth can hurt your business just as quickly, if not more so.
With this in mind, how can you make sure your photos send out every single time as quickly as possible?
- Ensure you always have a good Wifi connection, or use a cellular data device (like a Verizon Jetpack or Encore Networks EN-1000, depending on your use case).
- Ensure your photo booth software is reliable, especially during network slowness or outages.
- Set expectations with your customers and build this into the experience. Occasionally there is no wifi and no cellular coverage at a venue. It’s best to know this going in so you can configure the experience accordingly and plan to send out photos later.