Let’s face it, your venue is one of many wedding venues your clients will consider. This is the most important day of their life and deciding on the location is one of the biggest decisions they will make!

As your clients shop around for their perfect venue, it's important you stand out amongst the rest. From the moment they discover your venue, you need to make sure you provide a good client experience. A lack of communication and poor website design will prevent you from booking more clients and building a brand couples can trust.

To help you stand out & win more clients we have put together five tips below!

1. Make a good first impression

In less than one second on your site, visitors have already formed an opinion of your brand and service. This will likely be the first impression a couple will have of your wedding venue and it’s important to make it count. According to WebFX, 94% of first impressions relate to your site’s web design. Having poor navigation and missing information can create distrust of your service quality and reliability. By incorporating good photos, easy navigation, and clear action steps, often called CTAs or Call to Actions, you can create trust and a seamless client experience.

An easy way to create this client experience is with a marketplace storefront on a site like Weven. Through market research and client insights, Weven has created a storefront for venues that effectively presents the key information couples want to see on a page that is easy to navigate. Their storefront is constantly being optimized based off of thousands of couple's preferences and behaviors, to help maintain a clean design and clear CTAs. This takes the stress out of creating a good first impression and helps your venue build credibility up front by being positioned on a site couples can trust.

2. Make it easy to contact you

Once your website is up and running, it’s important to make sure you have an efficient way for clients to contact you. A standardized form (when done right) can show a couple you will quickly digest their key information to respond on topic and efficiently. A great example of this is the Weven contact form. This form embeds directly into your website and funnels all leads into your Weven account. The form is optimized to collect client information and allows you to learn key insights and buying triggers to help qualify leads quicker.

One way to amplify your contact form is to integrate it with your venue’s availability. By providing your available wedding dates, your clients can easily determine if your venue would work for their schedule. Adding this information up front eliminates any unnecessary back and forth and ultimately leads to more qualified lead connections.

3. Connect with leads quickly and thoughtfully

Responding to clients in a timely manner will go a long way in creating a positive experience from the start. It’s important to think about how to manage communications with your clients and come up with a plan regarding your availability to set expectations so they do not worry if you don’t respond immediately to every question. Make sure you set aside time each day to respond to any inquiries and come up with a strategy that works for your venue.

A couple’s wedding is one of the most important days of their lives and it’s important to be excited with them. When communicating, make sure you are engaged and interested in their concerns and feelings. It can be helpful to provide your clients with a one-sheeter with common FAQs to help answer some of their logistical questions. This will help cut out some of the back and forth and allow you to make a more personal connection right away.

4. Stay organized and on top of your leads

Couples imagine planning their entire wedding with you based on the experience they get as a lead. Failing to respond efficiently drives down your chance of tours and bookings as prospective clients lose confidence in your service quality. But we also know that with so many ways for a couple to contact your venue, it can be hard to keep up. This is where a customer relationship management software (CRM) can come into play and be a helpful way to keep track of your leads. A CRM system can help you see a lot more of your business in one place, by allowing you to enter client information into a single database.

At Mayflower Venues, we heard from hosts where other CRMs fell short -- missing leads, manual entering of data, no contracts or booking capabilities -- so we built a system to solve that for venues. Mayflower is the only software built for wedding venues and powered by intelligent learning from hundreds of other nontraditional venues. A key benefit of Mayflower's CRM is the integration of your CRM across your entire client engagement. Now all the data you need on a client flows with them from initial inquiry through their wedding day -- including, planning timelines, budgets, vendor contacts and COIs. Mayflower's CRM then combines all this data with powerful analytics to uncover key insights and buying triggers.

5. Guide & inspire your couples

In order to really stand out you should show you care by providing your couples with helpful wedding planning tips. Unless the bride or groom is a wedding planner, they will likely have lots of questions and no idea where to start. It’s important to be there for your clients and build credibility up front, so they know your venue can be trusted with their special day. Whether it’s through providing helpful wedding tips or area recommendations, showing you have useful insights will go a long way in booking more clients.

One of the most helpful ways you can be there for your clients is by providing a list of preferred or recommended vendors. A network of trusted vendors takes time to curate but is ultimately a great way to set yourself apart from other venues. By providing florists or photographers you’ve used and loved, you can help clients feel more at ease and confident in your venue. An easy way to keep track of your vendor relationships and easily share them with clients is with Mayflower’s Vendor Management tool.

All-In-One Solution

Mayflower helps venue hosts stay organized and communicate all in one platform. Whether you host 5 weddings a year or 50, Mayflower is here to help you save time, impress clients, and scale your business.

If you want to learn more about how your venue could grow with the Mayflower Venues platform, schedule a free call with a venue success representative.