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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