Developing A Solid Follow Up Process For Your Wedding Venue (Part 1)

When it comes to your wedding and events venue, follow-up is a major key to turning those inquiries and tours into actual paying customers who book with your venue. There is a way to make the follow-up process efficient and relatively low stress, and it’s called automation. We are going to go over the follow-up process regarding those initial emails sent in by couples who want to know more about you and your amazing space in this article. We will keep this short and sweet, going over the things you need to know to make your follow-up process smooth and swift.

When is a Follow Up Process Necessary?

As a wedding and events venue, the top emails you most likely see from couples are initial inquiries for information about your venue, and tour requests. Both of these types of emails must have a personalized follow-up process in place that is designed to respond to the sender as fast as possible. Speed is the name of the game here. 

The faster you can respond to your couple with quality value-add information, the more likely you will be top of mind for them. Couples tend to send out bulk inquiries to venues all at once, so fast response time will be memorable for them and show them you are serious about your business.

Automated Follow Ups & Real-Time Replies – When to Do Them?

The majority of your inquiry emails and tour requests coming into your inbox should be fielded by your automated welcome email sequence we discussed on last week’s The Venue Podcast. Automating your email funnel will help save your sanity and it will also help you weed out those couples whose wedding vision is not a perfect fit for your location. They are still a valuable email to hold onto though, but we’ll get into that shortly. 

There will be some emails that require you to email them a real-time response. These emails are not as common, but they happen. If they ask a very specific question, or a couple sends in an inquiry through a lead-generating site like theknot.com or weddingwire, you will have to respond to those directly. You can create a basic template to have on hand and use for faster response times, just make sure you personalize it and answer any specific questions they may ask.

What Does the Follow Up Process Look Like?

You will have two basic types of follow-up sequences that you will run depending on the type of email you receive whether it’s an initial inquiry or after a tour. Each one will be a series of personalized emails designed to help the couple in their planning process, and also show your expertise in the wedding industry. I walk through the wording of how I structure my emails step by step in the podcast episode linked below. 

Inquiries

If you have an initial inquiry come in, the welcome sequence you built should kick in immediately. This sequence is a further extension of the journey your website has already taken the couple on before they got to the actual act of sending you a request for more information.

If you are not sure what I am referring to here, this episode will walk you through step by step how to build your own welcome sequence. 

1. The first “Hello & Welcome” email will be triggered immediately once they submit their email on your website inquiry page. This should have an electronic brochure attached as well as your hidden sales page talked about on this episode. 
2. The second email should go out 2 days after the first email. 
3. The third email will go out 4 days after the initial email was sent.
4. The fourth email will go out 6 days after the initial email. 

Tours

After you have given your couple a tour of your venue, you will want to trigger the follow-up email sequence you built for tours. This sequence will look very similar to the welcome sequence above, however, the wording will be more tailored to building up the tour you just gave them. 

1. The first “Thank You” email should go out the same day of the tour. Include all electronic marketing pieces you have for your venue, and then mention something specific that they loved during your tour to personalize it and show you are listening to them and care about their vision. 
2. The second follow up email should go out 2 days after the tour. 
3. The third follow up email should go out 4 days after the tour. 
4. The fourth and final email should go out 6 days after the tour.

For either type of follow-up, you will want to build out your funnel to contain at least 3-5 follow-up emails with valuable content. Anything less than this is not truly serving your couple. Your goal should be to provide them with excellent content and service via email whether they book with you or not. Because down the road, you may have other opportunities to share with them, and their experience with you in the beginning matters. 

It’s Totally Worth It!

Once you have these sequences built and set to run, you really don’t have to do much of anything with them afterward. Taking the time to build a solid follow-up process for your business is going to bring your business to the next level. And if this type of thing intimidates you, know that you are not alone but also know that you are more capable than you realize! 

If you absolutely just don’t have the time, outsourcing this to a qualified professional is an excellent investment into your business as well! However you implement it, just make sure you have a solid follow-up process in place and watch the impact it will have on your business!

For more helpful tips on growing your venue business, check out more episodes of The Venue Podcast!

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