How KT Merry Education Has Scaled With the Use of SamCart’s CheckoutOS

At first glance, KT Merry and husband Chad Keffer’s photography looks like a spread in Vogue. In fact, their work has been featured in Vogue - and also Elle, People, Harper’s Bazaar, and a dozen other well-known publications. 

The wife-and-husband duo together make up KT Merry, a luxury destination wedding & editorial photography business. They’ve traveled around the world at length, photographing everything from wedding parties to portraits to travel and lifestyle experiences. In addition to their own business, they help other photographers scale their businesses and learn the tools of the trade with KT Merry Education.

The pair uses SamCart to sell those KT Merry Education courses and offerings, so we sat down with KT and Chad to understand how they’re using the platform to grow this lucrative aspect of their business and where they hope to take it in the future.

“SamCart has been with us from the beginning.”

Starting from scratch: How KT Merry Education came to be

Until the idea of KT Merry Education came to fruition, KT and Chad were spending the majority of their time boots on the ground, photographing these special events. The shift to selling digital products came with a big learning curve.

“It really was a new venture for us when we embarked on this,” Chad says. “It was 2019 when we started building the whole program out, and this was our first foray into digital products.”

Armed with advice from fellow community members and expert creators, they began creating the curriculum and offerings within KT Merry Education. Once built, their next big question was “How do we sell this thing?”

“Nobody really had a great solution for how you should sell your product. We needed a checkout page and we had no idea how any of that worked, so we got a tip from a friend who was using SamCart and raved about how intuitive it was,” Chad says. “They really suggested that we give this a whirl and it ended up being the first and only solution that we've used and still really enjoy using to this day. So SamCart has been with us from the beginning.”

“One of the beautiful things about SamCart was the ability to make the checkout experience branded to our business.”

Creating a seamless, branded checkout experience

The KT Merry brand identity is incredibly strong, so it was important to both KT and Chad to have a checkout experience that fit within that branding.

“All of our products are on an individual sales page, and a CTA leads them to a SamCart checkout experience. One of the beautiful things about SamCart was the ability to make the checkout experience branded to our business, so we use the standard templates within SamCart. We build them to match the branding of our pages and, what's really cool, is that all of our different products that we offer all have a very cohesive checkout experience,” Chad says. 

He continues: “I think it's really nice for people who come into our ecosystem to have a really uniform experience across any product they buy. It helps them understand that this is the KT Merry experience and they know exactly what they’re getting each time, they know how to use it, they have a Customer Hub login – so, for us, it's more about just creating something familiar for people that's also easy to navigate. It’s on-brand, it works well on mobile, and it’s secure.”

KT follows up with the importance of easy user experience, both for their customer and for herself and Chad on the back end, being paramount to the success of KT Merry Education.

“It’s why we're continuing to make sure we invest in this relationship… I'm seeing the new features that SamCart is releasing this year and getting really excited about the upcoming possibilities for making an even more refined and easy customer journey.”

What’s next: Continuous refinement and enhancement of KT Merry’s customer experience

In addition to refining and enhancing their brand and their educational offerings, KT and Chad look forward to enhancing their customer and checkout experiences with SamCart’s newest technology. 

“One of the core tenets of our brand is continuous refinement and enhancement and innovation of what we're already doing,” KT says. “I think that even goes with our sales pages and checkout experiences – we're always looking at it and going ‘Okay, great. How do we take away another hoop that our customers have to jump through?’”

“I'm also deeply passionate about making the aesthetic level even higher,” KT continues, “and that means continuously expanding the awareness within our market. It feels like a really small industry but there are a lot of people and more and more continuing to come into the creative space and deciding to go into small business entrepreneurship. So how do we continue to make [our offerings] more accessible?”

As beta testers of our recently released CheckoutOS, they’re looking forward to increased conversions, bigger profit margins, and even stickier brand recognition.

“That's where SamCart excels and that's why this partnership between us has lasted so long,” Chad says. “I'm seeing the new features that SamCart is releasing this year and getting really excited about the upcoming possibilities for making an even more refined and easy customer journey for our people. We have a really unique circumstance that 96% of our buyers are buying on mobile and so we're constantly trying to optimize everything for them.”

“[Checkout is] where SamCart excels and that's why this partnership between us has lasted so long.” 

“I'm really, really, really jazzed about the opportunity to test the mobile-enhanced checkout experience. I think it's going to be a game-changer in the industry – all we really want is for people to be able to have one-click purchase when they want something,” says Chad (a feature that is now available on SamCart: One-Click Checkout with Stripe Link or Apple Pay!).

At the intersection of simplicity, function, and beauty, Chad and KT of KT Merry Education look forward to forging an even more meaningful relationship with their customers and the exciting opportunities unlocked by CheckoutOS.

---------------------------
Check out SamCart’s latest suite of checkout solutions and conversion-boosting features by clicking here to see the features Chad and KT have been leveraging to scale brand awareness and sales.