Don’t get enough inquiries through your website?
Today I will share with you the unconventional but super friendly way to get your brides attention on your site so you can book more weddings (and you can start with this in 10 minutes today).
Yesterday I talked with a wedding photographer who was having problems getting inquiries from his website. He did have a good amount of traffic (around 40-100 visits a day) but he had 0 to 5 inquiries a month.
We (at All my lovin’, my own wedding photography business) book around 10% of all our inquiries. So to get to our target of 20-25 weddings a year we need a lot of inquiries (almost one every day). If you mention your prices on your website, your booking ratio will probably be higher.
So if this photographer had a 10% booking rate of 5 inquiries, this meant he books one wedding every two months. It is clear that that is not enough.
We all know the problem, brides surf around and look at so many websites that they will not remember where they saw that lovely image or were attracted by something.
The marketing law is that you have to have around seven touchpoints with your brides before they even consider you. And you can multiply that number because of all the times they could see you but they glanced over you. Think about all the listings you are in, but when someone doesn’t click through to your website there is no contact.
We hear it with All my lovin’ a lot, they saw us at different places before they contacted us.
When you want to make sure that brides will remember you after they have visited your website, there is another way of doing this.
It’s quite simple actually. It involves only a little bit of work, but if you have your administration set up like a champ, you can take the first step in 10 minutes.
Stay top of mind with potential clients by using automated email
So what are we going to do?
We are going to make sure that brides (and grooms of course, but my experience is that in 80% of the inquiries the bride is the one in charge) will hear from us a couple of times after they have visited the website. And we want to do this of course without us having to do a thing! Yay for automation!
How?
We are going to get their email address and send them a couple of follow-up emails.
„Been there, done that!” you might think now. But wait until you hear the whole story.
What is the one thing that people can’t resist hearing when planning a wedding?
- The mistakes that other people made and how to prevent them.
- The decisions other people made during the wedding planning and wished they didn’t make.
- The best thing about other people’s wedding.
- The only thing that had to be right at other persons’ wedding and how they made sure it went right.
- The budget-cutting tips on other people’s weddings.
It’s no wonder all the wedding blogs are very popular these days.
Why engaged couples want to give you their email address
And it’s easy to get email addresses from your visitors (highly targeted visitors since they are all looking for a wedding photographer) in exchange for a pdf. Especially when the pdf has an intriguing title like „10 tips for your wedding from our previous happy couples”.
Since all happy couples on wedding blogs are quite unknown, the couples on your website have something in common, you as the photographer, know them personally. Which makes a pdf with their tips less anonymous and more valuable.
You are giving wisdom away for just an email address. And since you are providing absolute value to them they will gladly give it.
So what you do is create an email list of all your previous couples and send them a couple of questions. I already gave you some inspiration above.
From the answers, create a nice branded pdf with portfolio images to make the tips easy & fun to read.
Create a sign-up box where you get the most traffic; homepage and blog sidebar are obvious choices.
Think of a super compelling title like:
Sign up and receive my pdf
„10 things my previous happy couples wanted to know before their wedding.”
And when somebody signs up you send them the pdf.
And now, you increased the odds that they will contact you considerably. Why? Because you gave something of value to them, and that pdf (with your gorgeous images) will be on their desktop for a while longer than your website was.
In the next series, I will tell you more about what you can send them after they received the pdf because you don’t want to stop here, of course. You want them to book you! Check out the next blog ‘7 Fears of Brides and Grooms‘.
I have created a handy pdf that expands on all the steps from this blog post. Sign up below to receive it.
If you are already on my list, you can enter too; you will automatically be redirected to the pdf.
What’s in the pdf:
- step by step guide to implementing this
- 12 great example questions to ask your previous couples
- email template to edit to your liking
- providers where you can set up your email list (free + paid)
- tips for compelling titles for your pdf
- how to send the pdf after they signed up
The download links is broken.
So sorry Paul and thanks for mentioning! It is fixed now.