Engagement season is upon us

When you’re in the wedding industry you don’t just do a count down for Christmas, you also do a count down until engagement season!

Engagement season is the busiest time of year for wedding venues; it runs from December 26th (yes Christmas Eve) until early March. This covers all the engagements from Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and that Valentines Day, which is still the most popular time for engagements.

So what are the top things you need to be doing in your venue to prepare yourself for engagement season?

1. Make sure your website is up to date! The best way to see if your website is working in the right way is to get someone who has never been on it before to go on and as they do you watch to see how they navigate around it. Does it work how you wanted it to work? Make sure you have images and reviews from the previous year, your website should not be showcase weddings from 2018!

2. Call to action! Are you easy to get in touch with? Do you have call to action points on your website and social media? Make this an easy process for couples to get in touch with you.

3. Reviews! What are people saying about you? You need to have this forefront and centre! Everyone likes reviews, its social proof and it’s in everything that we do. We consider something and then we look to see how other people are doing it before we have a decision.

4. Contact form! Do you have a contact form on your website? What are you asking? Is it memorable?

5. Social media! Now you know it’s likely that you will have a lot of potential couples visiting your social media platforms in a few months its good to get ahead of yourself. Make a plan of how you want your social media platforms to look and step by step plan of what you can do to get there. This is not something you can rush so it’s great to make a plan now and start working towards it.

6. Auto responder! Do you have an automatic email responder going out to couples after they have enquired? If you don’t, you should. This should be thanking couples for getting in touch and letting them know a timeframe of when they should hear back from you. Is there anything you can give them to read over in the meantime… a helpful blog post, a real wedding from your venue?

7. On-boarding process! What does this look like for your venue? It is smooth running? Do you have a welcome gift for your couples? After making a big buying decision its natural for us to doubt if we have made the right decision or not, this is great news for you because you can reassure the couple that they have made the right choice!

8. Show your face! People buy from people, couples need and like to know that you are a real person. The like to know who is at the other end of that email, show your face on your website and socials so they know who that is. Be real and be relatable!

More to come on preparing for engagement season but for now think about the above and start making changes so you are ready to maximise each enquiry that comes in your inbox!

Do you have any questions? Email me and I’ll always get back to you.

Colette