email marketing, bridal marketing, wedding business, wedding business marketing, Book More Brides, wedding business education

How do you get brides to respond?

Here’s the all too frequent scenario:

  •     Bride (or groom) emails you asking for your “prices and packages.”
  •     You respond promptly with your best professional response and…
  •     NOTHIN’.

(Insert cricket sounds here.)

What the heck is going on? They emailed YOU for information, which means they must be interested. Right? What black hole opened and swallowed up the email response you truly deserve?

Untwist those knickers; if you are serious about getting training to get past these common sales objections and more, get on a call me with me here: https://pages.bookmorebrides.com/consultation

First, here are a few likely reasons why she DIDN’T respond.

1. Your response was too slow.

The Kellogg’s School of Management study tells us that the best time to respond to a lead is within 5 minutes.

Why?  Because she’s still sitting at her computer.  (Or hovering over her iPhone.)

If you wait even one hour to respond, you are 21x LESS LIKELY to reach her.  Sorry to crush your fast response time reputation, Speedy.

2. Your response put her to sleep.

Your response went something like this:

Congratulations on your engagement!

We at Acme Weddings specialize in providing high quality, professional [whatever you do] for the best prices.  We’ve been featured in Blah Blah magazine…

Call us for your free, no-obligation consultation…

*Snore.*  What?  What was that?  No, I did NOT fall asleep at the keyboard!

The average bride contacts 3-10 vendors when searching for a service.  If your response looks anything like this, she barely even noticed it in the stack of emails in her inbox.

3. You didn’t tell her how to respond.

Now, wait a second!  I specifically told her to call me and schedule a meeting…

Oh, did you?

If you’re like 99% of the wedding vendors out there, your response went something like this:

If you’d like to meet with me to discuss your wedding, please call me at 555-GET-LOST.

That’s what you “told” her to do, isn’t it?

Unless you give her a specific time, date, and ask a direct QUESTION that requires an answer, you’re not likely to get a response out of a busy bride.

4. You scared her away.

This is really the #1 reason why she doesn’t respond.  I know you don’t find yourself very scary (except when you look in the mirror after a long night of binge drinking) but there are lots of things you do that scare her off.

Things such as:

  • Sending her a price list.  Ouch!  Can you say sticker shock?
  • Giving her too many choices.  When faced with too many choices (click here, visit this, call this number, meet with that…) the bride will choose to make NONE.  I’m not making this stuff up; it’s Psychology 101.
  • Asking her too many questions.  If you hit her with a list of 20 questions, she doesn’t have the time or brain space to respond.  She’s a bride planning a wedding, for Ringo’s sake!
  • Your hideous grammar, spelling and lack of proper sentence structure sent her screaming.  If you can’t compose a well-written response in English, you should not be the one responding.

The bride is a sensitive, emotional creature in the wild, easily scared off by wedding pros with good intentions, like you.

5. She’s a little busy right now.

That bride really meant to respond to you, your email was super cool and everything, but really, she’s just been so busy since the engagement…

Her head is swimming and her calendar is booked up.  She just hasn’t gotten around to responding yet.

And she probably WON’T anytime soon because you messed up #3 and didn’t ask her a question that actually requires an answer, and you didn’t give her a deadline the bumps you up her priority list.  Ah-ha!

6. You didn’t have permission to email her.

Now, in my original scenario, you obviously DO have permission to email her, but hang with me here.

I added #6 because whenever I talk about this topic, invariably someone says, “They never respond to my emails!”

And I ask, “Where did the lead come from?”

The answer: “A bridal lead list I paid good money for!”

If she didn’t contact you, she didn’t give you specific permission to email her, no matter what the list broker told you.  Hence, her lack of response.

You might want to notice what DIDN’T make this list of reasons why she didn’t respond.

It’s not because:

  • The ONLY thing she cares about price.
  • She wasn’t really interested in the first place.
  • She went with someone else.  (Well, it might be that, but probably not if you responded within 24 hours.)

Now that we’ve covered what NOT to do, I’ll reveal what you SHOULD be doing instead to get a super-fast, enthusiastic response that leads to the exact action you want…coming soon in my next article!

Until then…

Want to learn how to get leads but also book them and you are serious about getting help to grow?

Connect with me for a free consultation to identify a plan to get you booked and busy.  Click here: 

https://pages.bookmorebrides.com/consultation

*For the sake of brevity I have chosen to use the words “bride” and “she” in this blog post.  I’m not suggesting that only brides or heterosexual couples plan a wedding.