Streamline Your Wedding Business: Must-Have Tools for Efficiency and Success
When you’re first getting started or things are changing in your wedding business, one of the most time consuming and frustrating things can be figuring out what tools are right for you.
There are so many options out there for planning and managing and communicating and organising all the things in your business and quite often you are on your own when it comes to figuring out and researching all of the different options.
Since launching The Wedding Business Hub we have discovered certain business tools that we simply couldn’t live without and wish we had found a whole load sooner!
Some of the tools we are using each day could help simplify your life and so we're sharing them today in the hope you'll find them just as helpful!
Full Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, and if you go through them to make a purchase, we will earn a commission. We only share products we highly recommend and have used and tested and that we genuinely believe in. The commission comes at no extra cost to you and funds our free content such as our blog, podcast and free videos for our wedding business community.
Ready to Dive in? Let's Go....
Flodesk
First up, I want to stress the importance of building an email list for your business. Think of your email list as a warm list of people who really want to hear from you and it's also some protection of your audience.
Your Instagram followers, your Facebook Likes, Pinterest followers or your LinkedIn connections aren’t yours. The data belongs to those social media platforms. Only building an audience over on these social media platforms leaves your business open to risk and if you don't have your own email list we would highly recommend you starting one.
Flodesk is the fastest growing email marketing platform helping small business owners design emails people love to get. From stunning email templates to immersive forms, Flodesk makes it easy for beginners and experts alike to build their email lists, engage their audiences and convert subscribers into customers—whether you have a website or not. And it's loved by a lot of wedding business professionals thanks to it's beautiful design features.
Since moving to Flodesk from MailChimp we have seen a huge increase in the open rate and conversion rate of our emails (that's the sales part. )
We are easily able to build workflows and it's Drag-and-Drop Email Builder makes it look like you have designers crafting your emails for you. They also have a form template gallery, thousands of images to choose from and you can upload your own, plus there's tons of email layouts to choose from. As a wedding business owner you choose to segment audiences if you wish to send out more personalised emails for example those who have booked and are yet to book you can do it really easily. Plus you can set up automatic workflows that work with your website and deliver freebies, send packages, prices and further information from a wedding fair on autopilot without you needing to be anywhere near your computer!
For us in our business it's meant we can be getting on with other things whilst having our marketing go out and autopilot and having beautifully crafted emails and a visual brand is so important in such a creative industry.
With Flodesk, members are never penalised for
successfully growing their lists or for sending emails. There's nothing worse than being told you've got to wait when you've got some news to share. It costs $38/month (around £30 a month) for unlimited email sends, unlimited subscribers and unlimited access to all it's features. Plus if you are moving across from another provider it couldn't be easier to do - they have great customer support and helpful and super clear articles to walk you through the move in a few clicks!
Canva
If you know anything about us, listen to our podcast or are in our group , you'll know we love a bit of Canva! Canva is very easy to use thanks to its drag-and-drop interface and has loads and loads of brand assets you can tap into. Also, you don’t have to worry about starting from scratch either, although you can do that if you want. There are a ton of templates you can choose from to work with multiple categories. These include Instagram posts, infographics, posters, business cards, leaflets, brochures and more. If you've downloaded an e-book or enrolled on a freebie from us, chances are we've designed it in Canva. We use it for absolute tons in our business from designing website and social graphics, podcast promotion, lead magnet design, landing pages and more... We honestly use it everyday and find it super simple to use.
Canva is free to use however they also have a premium service available. This gives you access to more features such as premium quality stock images, videos, graphics fonts, branding elements, resizing options, background removers. More than 400,000 easy to use templates, 100 GB of storage, folders for easy organisations and so much more....
You are able to try Canva Pro free of charge for 30 days to see if you love it as much as we do!
Trello is a fab tool for any wedding industry professional. Our Content Club members access their pre done content in easy to organise tabs and cards and it's super easy for sit and create tasks and boards relating to anything we may need to organise for our business.
Fab for any business Trello’s boards, lists, and cards enable those who may need to collaborate on a project or wedding go from ideas to action in seconds. Visual and easy-to-use, Trello helps to bring projects to life and keep them moving forward. It's perfect for you to use inside of your Wedding Business to organise client ideas,
One of the biggest pain points for those planning events is managing all of your event to-dos in one place. One of the biggest pain points for those planning events is managing all of your event to-dos in one place. In the old days, Type-A event planners would resort to an Excel spreadsheet, or a wall filled with Post-it Notes ordered chronologically.
The problem with using Excel or other methods of managing your to-do list to plan a professional event is that these tools don’t give event organizers the needed visibility to get things done while keeping the big picture in mind. These tools also don’t support in-platform communication, meaning that wedding professionals waste time sending emails or arranging logistics meetings instead of getting real work done.
Trello has wedding planning templates from overall theme plans to decor checklists, seating charts and wedding party attire. Easy to use and predone, Trello template boards will help give you that edge over competitors and your client a luxury and unforgettable experience when working with you. Help your clients to stay on top of important wedding planning deadlines and keep your own mind and business organised with a different private board for each client you work with that they can collaborate with and it'll ensure they don't miss any important payments or deadlines either.
You can also add workflows in too such as your onboarding and offboarding process to make sure that each client gets the same experience working with you.
