5 Things we do Every Time a Wedding Client Books

Workflows, workflows, workflows. Wanna save time? Wanna make sure that you aren’t missing a step?

Then you’ve got to make sure you have clear workflows that you repeat over and over. These workflows will streamline your client experience and keep you working smarter, not harder!!!

So today, we’re breaking down the five things we do EVERY time we book a wedding with our onboarding workflow.

Countersign the contract

It is imperative that you countersign your contracts. With a former attorney in the house (aka Cameron Goff), we know that our contracts are not valid without a countersignature. Lucky for us, Honeybook makes that easy by saving our digital signature and so it’s just two easy clicks. Looking for an awesome CRM? Use this link to get 50% off your first year of Honeybook!!

Send our “After Booking” email template

Templates save our lives and our “After Booking” template is full of gold. It’s one of our longest email templates and includes everything from a congratulations for booking, scheduling an engagement session, checking out our album webpage to view pricing and options, to a questionnaire that we call the Timeline Starter for our couples to fill out so we can draft up their general timeline. It’s a great place to reinforce specifics from the consult and set expectations for moving forward.

Outsource Gift Box & Editing

We outsource our booking gifts through White Spruce Market. So ordering their gift box is as easy as sending off their address to Bailey over at WSM. But we love to get gift boxes to our couples ASAP. Because, first, we want to get our Wedding Guide in their hands right away to help them as they get deeper into planning. This gives vendor recommendations, timeline suggestions, engagement session expectations, and more. Second, our couples have just put a large investment down on us. This is also one of their first large investments for their wedding (often after a venue and planner). The last thing we would want is for them to begin feeling buyer’s remorse. So we try to curb this by surprising and delighting with a gift box delivered to their door.

We also outsource our wedding editing. So, I will use a calendar system to mark when I will send photos over to Amanda, our editor. For context, we will edit about 100 images that will serve as a baseline and as the preview or blog post for that wedding. From there, she helps apply the edits to the entire gallery. She’s incredible and trained on our preferences & style. She’ll send them back, we’ll fine-tune them, and then send them out to our couples. So this needs to be added to the editing calendar right away.

Follow them on Instagram and Friend on Facebook

How awkward would it be to show up at an engagement session not following your clients yet? We totally understand that some photogs run their businesses as professionally as possible and with that, don’t friend their clients. We get it!! But our mission is to get to know our couples on a deeper, personal level and by following them on their socials, it can help us do that! Plus, we have a private facebook group of our Cameron & Tia brides, so we’ve got to add our new bride and post an introduction of her in there!! So when clients book, it feels like the perfect time to make it “facebook official” 😉

Update our Spreadsheets

Yeaaaah, we’re big spreadsheet people. We love to keep data, track conversion rates, and follow up on leads. So there are two places that we need to update when a couple books. First, is our inquiry spreadsheet. We keep a spreadsheet of all of our inquiries for the year – so “Inquiries 2020” that includes the couples’ names, venue, date inquired, wedding date, referral source, the outcome (no reply, consult scheduled, booked, etc), days between consult and booking, inquiry data by month, and bookings by month. There are so many things we love about this – from being able to check back easily on open leads to looking back on last year’s hot and slow months. So once a couple books with us, we get to move this to “booked” and do a little happy dance.

The second is our basic “Weddings 2020” spreadsheet. There we have a lot of repeat info – names, venue, inquiry date, and wedding date, but then we also track pricing and payments made. It’s a great way to see what the future year will look like financially at a glance. So this bomb couple gets added in there too!

If you’re missing a streamlined workflow, take a five minutes today to write down what should happen in your biz when a client books. Take some of our steps, add in your own, and get it down on paper (or our fav, Excel spreadsheet). It doesn’t need to be perfect right now and encompass everything. But you should start. And then from there you can tweak and perfect as you go!!

And that’s it!! It’s that easy and we just repeat each time! Easy-peasy onboarding workflow.

Get after it!!

Want more of this amaze education? Well, we’ve got it for you. Click below to download our totally free inquiry email template – YAAAAS!

Interested in more of our workflows? We’re pulling back the curtain on the tasks we do every single Monday.