Do Bridal Lead Lists Actually Work?

Question:

HI Stephanie & Jeff,

Still benefiting from your Book More Brides videos, excellent value for money.

You raised an interesting point about having leads stopped, one of the biggest providers I have been using for years has just stopped his business. I know you are on the other side of the pond but do you know of any good firms that sell bridal leads over here in the UK?

Bye for now

Terry

Answer:

Hi, Terry.

Most paid sources of bridal lead lists are not worth the money. The leads aren’t targeted for your specific business by type of client, budget, style, etc., making them very poor quality. It typically takes a lot of work following up for very little return.

Our clients have reported getting a response from only 1 out of 100 bridal leads of this type! Apparently, they sell them cheap for a reason. :)

A better investment would be to put that money into turning your website into a real money-making machine, or possibly running some Facebook ads. They are much more targeted demographically and you can test your results. More ideas for effective wedding marketing at a reasonable cost here.

In other words, rather than purchasing leads, build your own bridal lead list! When you send targeted traffic to your website and then get those brides and grooms to enter their name and email to get a cool freebie (what we call a “Bride Bribe”), like a free report, video or valuable checklist, you’re creating a list of very warm, qualified leads you can now follow up with.

If you DO decide to purchase bridal leads, investigate their quality first. Ask your wedding vendor friends about their experiences, and grill the company for statistics and references.

You’ll want to ask:

  • How many unique visitors do you get?
  • How do you qualify your leads?
  • Do you provide stats on my ad views and click throughs?
  • What exactly these brides think they’ll be receiving when they sign up? If the bride hasn’t contacted you directly, she often considers your emails to be spam, no matter what she agreed to upon sign up.

With any bridal lead list, start out with a monthly trial if possible to measure your results before committing to something long term.

I was very impressed with the advertising experiment with the UK site, Wedding Chaos, done by Claire Gould over at English Wedding. They offer great metrics for tracking and you can learn a lot from her results and test them out for yourself, which I highly recommend.

Good luck with everything!

Stephanie

What do YOU think about bridal lead lists? Have they worked for you?

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Facebook Privacy: The Good And The Bad For Business Owners

No matter how much we love Facebook for wedding business marketing the truth is that privacy issues and questions regarding possible privacy issues have been a problem from the beginning. While that doesn’t stop most people using Facebook it does create frustration. The one good side of things is that there is almost always a way to block information from being shared that you don’t want the world to know about (and yes, some of it just requires using common sense).

Facebook believes in the importance of constantly evolving with the demands of their audience. This has led to a new way of collecting data on people both online and offline for the sake of their advertisers. Obviously this is raising red flags for many people, but thankfully, there is a work around. Make sure to check out Thorin Klosowski’s article to learn more.

The good side of Facebook’s constant research on tracking data is the fact that they are able to help their advertisers target the right people better than almost anyone else. This means that your advertisements go out to the group of people that might actually be interested in your business, and no one else. What do you think though? Do the benefits for targeted advertising outweigh the privacy risks?

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Better Facebook Targeting By Zip Code

Couple_DrivingNationwide marketing for your business initially sounds great until you realize that brides almost always end up buying locally. As a result you have probably already figured out that when you use Facebook ads you can choose the city or state that your business actually needs to target.

Even better than using that targeting though is the fact that Facebook has finally launched the ability to target your ads to specific zip codes according to Jennifer Van Groves article. This means that if you want to target a specific section of a big city like NYC, or target a large area instead of just one town in the west you can. The more you can target the correct area for your wedding business the better your results are going to be. What do you think? Is this a helpful thing for your business?

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Facebook Ads Should Send People Off-Platform

Sending people to your wedding business Facebook Fan Page from an ad is going to be a lead killer unless you have fully integrated your Facebook page with an email opt in and a storefront. That said, directing people from your web page to your Facebook page will accomplish the exact opposite.

Couple_Driving

The purpose of an ad on Facebook is to reach a group of people whom your business may never reach otherwise. Making the choice to use the ad to direct them to your website encourages them to get a better grasp of your business, and encourages them to consider committing to you. 

In his article, Tom Johansmeyer encourages Facebook uses to use their web page as the landing page is completely controllable by the business owner. You can choose to build a sales page with a coupon just for Facebook visitors, or take them to your photo gallery. Not only that, but the tools available for building your sales funnel on you webpage will encourage an up-sell of your products to visitors.

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How to Target Facebook Categories for Advertizing

Facebook is moving toward helping advertisers reach the correct market by testing out some new and exciting strategies for choosing categories for ads. Why should this excite you? Well according to Josh Constine’s amazing articlesome of the sub categories are things like “Engaged (

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Regardless of the great advances you can still implement more targeted ads by choosing from the current lists of categories, and sub categories. For instance you can target your area down to the exact mileage away from your business base that you want to reach, or choose to target single gals in a certain age range. The more targeted you are with the categories the better you will be able to reach people who are actually looking for your product/service. 

Keep checking your demographics and plan on changing your exact target audience for your Facebook adds at least once every couple of months. If you aren’t seeing high returns on your ads don’t be afraid to try targeting a different group of people.

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How To Create a Winning Facebook Ad Campaign

The wonderful world of Facebook Ad campaigns is one of the easiest ways to draw in leads and potential clients, but can be a bit tricky if you don’t know how to pull it off.

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First of all you need a Facebook fan page, which hopefully you either already have, or are working on. Second, make sure that you target your ads at your actual client base. People in California are not going to book a florist in Tennessee, so you need to target people in your actual area.

According to Kalen Smith you also need to set it so that you will target the same people at least 5 times as it takes that many times to have them convert from interested to actually booking you.

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