Wedding Industry Blog

In my opinion, the wedding industry is the best industry in the world to work in - you are working with people on the happiest occassion in their life and, provided you keep your end of the bargain, you should thougroughly enjoy every step of the journey.

Its not all fun and games for a wedding supplier though. For all its good points it has a fairly major downside - the short customer life. In 99% of cases, you will only sell to a customer once, after they’re married that’s it you have to find a completely new person to make your next sale.

That’s the trouble with the wedding industry, successful businesses in every other walk of life build their success on a loyal customer base, but that’s just not possible when you are selling to Brides so you must find another way.

So what is the solution?

There are a variety of different methods that can be used to build a wedding business, but one of my personal favourites is establish and introduce a product range.

If your customer is only going to be your customer once, you need to sell as much as you can to them when you can and to do this, you need to have other products and services to compliment your core offer.

For example a bridal shop normally sells wedding dresses, maybe shoes and sometimes accessories. Shoes and accessories are an absolute must and the shop should also be thinking about things like a guide to choosing your wedding dress, dress cleaning, dress storage, keepsake boxes, memoirs, a guide to keeping you wedding dress and anything else that you think could be added and sold.

Lets say the average sale value of your wedding dress was £1000 and you made 50% margin giving you £500 gross profit per customer as standard. Implementing this strategy would give you the following process and potential profits:

£12    Guide to Choosing the Perfect Wedding Dress
£500  Wedding Dress                                                                      
£50    Bridal Shoes                                                                           
£30    Bridal Accessories                                                                 
£10    Keepsake Box                                                                        
£40    Dress Cleaning                                                                       
£25    Dress Storage Box                                                                 
£10    Wedding Dress Memoir                                                         
£657 Total Gross Profit                                                                  

The beauty of this process is that although the increase in your gross profit is over 30%, increases in Net profit can be well over 50% as there are no expensive marketing and acquisition costs with the additional sales - where would you be if you could increase your Net profit by 50%?

This is a fantastic strategy which is going to be even more prominent in the next couple of years. Whatever product you are supplying, you can add additional products to your offering no matter how abstract you think they may be, I can’t guarantee that everyone will buy them, but I can guarantee that if you don’t have them, no one will!!!

If you are interested in learning more about introducing this strategy and increasing the profitability of your wedding business, then take a look at the Evolution Programme which is an easy to follow, step by step guide to building and running a business selling to the wedding industry.

General Marketing, Profit Startegies, Wedding Recession

If you are a supplier of the wedding industry you used to be able to get an advantage by having a web site. Things have come a long way from those early days of the internet and now it’s not only an advantage having a site but essential, with over 95% of brides visiting a supplier website before she will make a decision on them.

It doesn’t stop there though, you may have a friend or relative who know’s a bit about computers who can put something together for you on the cheap, but you need a site which fulfils the needs of the modern bride for it to be fully effective. If it doesn’t match these criteria, not only will you be losing money from potential customers, but you will also be rendering any money you spend on advertising almost worthless as your site will be the first stop for a bride who has seen and liked your advert.

All in all over 99% of brides use the internet to search for companies to supply their wedding so it is vital that you have something for them to find in the first place. Once they are there, if your site isn’t designed and constructed well, over 50% will leave within the first 2 seconds never to return again.

At Evolution we use our extensive knowledge of all areas of the UK wedding industry to establish your customer requirements and then build an advanced customer focused site aimed at delivering results to you, the business owner.

If you want to find out more about wedding website design then please either visit the main Evolution site or alternatively call us on 0870 300 4971. Alternatively, if you already have a website which you want to improve yourself then the Evolution Programme can walk you through the steps that will take your site from being an also ran to an industry leader quickly and easily and in a cost effective manner.

General Marketing

Your wedding website is the key to the success of your business and will be the hub of all your marketing activity. For 95% of brides that you reach, the first port of call after seeing your name, advert or leaflets is to check out your website. This means that if your website is poor, your enquiries will be as well!

Don’t worry though, here are 10 things which your wedding website must have for you to check and improve:

1. Clear Design and Layout
2. Easy Navigation
3. Customer Focused Headlines
4. Optimised Page Titles
5. Focused Keywords
6. Custom Descriptions
7. Useful Content
8. A Blog
9. Calls to Action
10. Contact Details or an Enquiry Form on Every Page

Whatever your business, your website should be returning at least 10 enquiries per week on average, if its not then one or more of the points above need to be addressed. For a full review of your wedding website you may be interested in our Website Review Service for Wedding websites.

To address any issues you find when looking at the 10 points above we recommend that you join the Evolution Programme where you can find all the information you ned to make your website a bridal trap!

General Marketing, Websites

I know from my experience in the wedding industry that very few businesses have either a business plan or a wedding specific marketing plan, even fewer have one that they adhere to and is actually useful to their business!

If either of those scenarios sound familiar then you are seriously missing a trick! While a business plan is important, a marketing plan is essential and will seriously take your business forward year after year.

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

A Wedding Business Marketing Plan shouldn’t just be a few ideas and a summary written down, referred to once and then forgotten forever, it should be a working document that you know like the back of your hand and that is constantly updated. You should look at it at least once a week to see what your actions are and update your results.

Your marketing plan should include the following:

1. A list of marketing activities that you have used previoudly in your business.
2. A description on how each activity is carried out.
3. The previous return from each activity.
4. A calendar listing when each activity will be carried out.
5. An up to date report on how the marketing plan is working this year versus last year.

If you keep track of this information then I guarantee your business will move forward in leaps and bounds.

If you need some help writing your own wedding business marketing plan then I recommend that you look at the Evolution Programme which will not only guide you through the process step by step, but will also identify and outline the best marketing activities for wedding businesses to achieve results. To learn more about the Evolution Programme click here.

Free Stuff, General Marketing