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

Further to my recent post on the effects of the wedding industry on the recession, I have been inundated with calls and emails by conerned businesses asking what they should be doing to ride out the recession so here are my recommendations.

THE most important thing to address at any time but especially moving in to the recession, is your website. Nothing has a bigger effect on the number of enquiries you generate or your companies image within the industry. I’m not talking about getting a friend or relative to do it or even doing it yourself, I’m talking about getting a professional looking site from a company who knows about doing business online, internet marketing, search engine optimisation and converting visitors to customers.

Here are the reasons why it is essential:

98% of brides search for wedding suppliers on the internet
95% of brides will check out your website at some point during the sales process no matter where they meet you.
You will reach more brides on the internet than any other form of marketing.

What does this mean? If you don’t have an excellent website then all of these points will apply to you:

You are losing enquiries - FACT
You are wasting money on your advertising - FACT
Your customer acquisition cost is too high - FACT
Your business is at risk from th recession - FACT

Let me give you an example. One of our customers had a website and was receiving one or two enquiries per week from it, we redesigned the site to make it more functional and addressed the conversion and they have now doubled the enquiries they get without doing anything else! Obviously by doubling the enquiries it has also led to their sales doubling as well which means that their annual turnover has doubled from an investment of just £1500.

In part 2 I’ll be describing the next biggest mistake wedding businesses make that could be affecting their bottom line big time and it’s something that can be addressed immediately without spending a penny.

Until then

Edward

Wedding Recession

A recent report by the Weddingplan insurance firm has indicated that the average cost of a wedding in the UK has risen to nearly £21,000! What’s more this appears to be a national average meaning that this figure could be substantially more for couples in the south of the country and even more that that for those tying the knot in London.

The soaring price of commodities has helped push up the cost of food and drink which is magnified by the change in trend to have a full sit down meal rather than just a buffet spread. This has pushed the average reception cost up to over £7000 including the venue hire, catering, drinks and entertainment making this by far and away the biggest cost for a majority of couples.

The second biggest outlay is the honeymoon coming in at £3220 and third is the Bride’s engagement ring averaging just over £1400.

The figures generated by the report , produced this summer, may well change fairly quickly however with the wedding industry expected to be hit by the recession even more than was thought at the time of writing.

The report continues the unbalanced trend in the wedding industry of a decreasing number of weddings against an increasing industry value.

To read more about the average UK wedding cost in the uk visit the main Evolution site or to find out more about the effects of the recession on the wedding industry view the Wedding Recession category of the Blog.

Here is a link to the full story which appeared in the Daily Telegraph - Wedding costs soar to more than £20,000!

Wedding Industry, Wedding Recession

Wedding Industry Hit by Recession?

I’m being asked this question at least once every day at the moment and whilst no one will know the answer for sure for some time yet, I can give a very good indication of what will happen over the next twelve months and further into the future.

The simple answer is yes, the wedding industry will be hit by the recession there is no getting away from it. I know many so called industry experts who have said that the wedding industry is immune to recession as people will always get married and while that is true, there is no doubt in my mind that, although some, maybe most, people will still be tying the knot, they certainly won’t be spending as much money as Brides in years preceeding - they literally won’t be able to.

The main factors that will effect the industry are as follows:

Unemployment

There are massive redundancies taking place in just about every industry in the country and this will have a knock on effect in the wedding industry, with Brides, Grooms and, maybe more directly, Brides Fathers being affected and therefore unable to make the financial outlays in line with the current average spend within the market.

Depreciating House Prices

In the past, when Brides have had to fund their own dream wedding, one of the first port of call to raise the finance has been a remortgage to release some of the equity that has built up in their property. While there may still be some people who can still venture down this route, for the majority it will be much, much harder.

Credit Crunch

This is really a continuation of the above point. Where Brides have had to fund their own weddings in the past, loans and other forms of credit have been a large part of planning their dream wedding and with this credit being harder to come by, their ability to spend is going to be limited.

General Financial Uncertainty

Any recession brings general underlying financial uncertainty and an unwillingness to make large financial commitments, and while there may be a number of brides who are already financially committed or will still make the commitment in the future, there will be a large number who will choose to wait until there is more security in the economy.

So what does this mean for businesses working in the induustry, is it all doom and gloom or is there light at the end of the tunnel?

The answer to these questions will depend very much on your own state of mind and your attitude towards your business and customers. I can’t stand here and lie to you and tell you everything will be fine for everyone because it won’t, but what I can say is there are some businesses out there who won’t just survive through these tough times, but will actually thrive as a result.

The way I see it is that a recession is a natural righting of order which will strip out the dead wood from the industry leaving the entire industry stronger as a result.

If you want to survive this downturn then you have to address certain aspects of your business and ensure that they are watertight - if they’re not it could be you making way for your competitors to thrive.

For a recession health check on your wedding business visit our Wedding Marketing Consultation page and fill in your details.

Wedding Industry, Wedding Recession