Let’s face it, weddings are fun, stress-free and enjoyable when you are attending one as an invitee – the food, the drinks, the romance, the cake! Hmmm . . .
The story is quite different when you take the seat of a wedding organizer. From securing the event location and working out outfits for the bride/groom and their detail to ensuring the availability of food and drinks, decorators, and finally, sending out the almighty invites. Ugh! That’s a lot of work to think about.
Your job as a wedding planner is to save couples the stress they feel when planning for their big day by taking on the hassle yourself. This makes you responsible if anything goes wrong or everything goes right; that is why applying modern technologies, such as text messaging, to your wedding planning business can really go a long way in getting a lot of work done and putting your business in front of the next couple.
What’s the Phone for?
Chances are, everyone involved in a wedding event uses a mobile phone; that includes the couples, groom’s detail, bridal party, guests, caterers, venue managers, and florists, etc. So why not get the plans off and rolling with text messaging?
Send out invitations.
Wedding invitation cards are cool and trendy but they might not be enough to reach all invitees at a given time. Just how many IVs do you need to print and at what cost? You are better off sending SMS which delivers instantaneous, has a 98% open rate, and costs way cheaper.
Be aware that some people may feel that an actual printed invitation card delivered by mail has a more personal touch. While cards shouldn’t be entirely ruled out, sending invitations via text message reaches more people within a short period of time compared to emails, phone calls, or postal services.
Instant communication with other wedding professionals
It is easier to communicate with carters, florists, decorators, venue managers, and other professions on what you want or what you think at any particular time using text messages. Assuming the happy couple has changed their color scheme from gold and fuchsia to peach and silver a week before the wedding date, how do you inform the florist and decorators of these changes in dead time?
Set up autoresponders to answer queries
In planning a grand event, guests would have questions that you would need to answer. However, getting back to each guest in a timely manner can be tasking, considering the fact that you have other things to sort out before the big day.
You can set up an automated system configured to detect keywords in texts from guests and reply with pre-written texts. That text can convey the information requested or direct them to the appropriate section of the wedding website for more information.
Collect R.S.V.P
We can think of a better way to know if your invited guests would be available to attend the wedding event or not other than via text message. You can set up a text-code or keyword which guests can use to tell you if they would attend the event or not. R.SV.P response can be configured to detect who has not responded so that you can send them a follow-up text.
For a wedding where the couples are particular about number of attending guests for budget purposes, you would be doing them a great deal of service by collecting R.S.V.P.
Send out reminders
The D-day is a week or three days away; don’t assume invited guests would remember your glamorous invitation, people are pretty occupied with their daily lives. Sending reminders is extremely important and can only be effectively achieved by SMS. If you have already collected R.S.V.P, your reminder should be based on guests who would attend the event.
Reminders can be scheduled ahead of time and sent automatically or manually. A great reminder schedule should be able to alert invitees two weeks before the event, a week later, and finally, the night before “I do.”
Planning weddings is headache enough for soon-to-be-newlyweds and they are right to pass all their troubles to professional wedding planners, they don’t deserve the stress! You as a wedding planner ought to get professional help such as that of a comprehensive text messaging service to make your job easier and more effective.
Don’t forget to invite us on your next wedding adventure.