You have a website. You get traffic to your website. But something’s wrong. You’re not getting as many inquiries as you’d like.
Stop and take a really good look at your website. It’s a mess. Isn’t it? It’s been neglected with out-of-date images and missing information. The design is generic and outdated and the content is lackluster.
Remember when you first got your website? You were on the cutting edge and had a vision for communicating with brides 24/7. Maybe your website was awesome once. Maybe it did work to convert traffic into inquiries, but the well has dried up.
Times have changed and if your website is more than three years old, you haven’t changed with them.
So here you are today with a crappy website that may be doing more harm than good with your Millennial Brides, who expect to find everything they need, beautifully presented no matter what device they’re viewing it on.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In less than 10 minutes, you can audit your website for the following website must-haves. In a couple of hours (at the most) you can fix the worst mistakes yourself and start turning that traffic into inquiries and paying brides.
Ready?
7 Website Must-Haves for Wedding Professionals
OK. Open up a browser and pull up your website. See it? Good. Go through the following list and make sure you have all of the elements for an amazing website that will turn traffic into inquiries.
1. An Awesome Homepage
Really, I’m serious.
You’re homepage needs to be awesome. And by awesome, I don’t mean it needs to be full of slick galleries, fancy widgets and so-called robust social media integration. And I certainly don’t mean it makes you feel awesome about yourself and your business.
It sounds counter intuitive, but the fact is, your website isn’t about you.
It’s really about the brides who are visiting it. How can you help them find the information they’re looking for? How can you delight them and tap into their emotions and fantasies about their weddings? How can you make it easier for them to choose the right vendor?
Therefore, in addition to making a great visual first impression, your homepage should guide brides deeper into your website so she can answer any questions she has about her wedding and choosing the right vendors.
On any webpage, you should have one main goal–one thing you want the visitor to do. And this one-thing philosophy is especially true on your homepage because it’s one of your most heavily trafficked pages and is often the page that generates the most inbound links.
Your home page should communicate three things to a bride:
- Here’s what I have for you.
- Here’s how it will benefit you.
- Here’s what to do next.
For the here’s what I have for you part. This is your actual product or service. Be specific and think about what sets you apart from the competition. So if you bake and decorate wedding cakes, that’s good. Better is if you mention that your wedding cakes are freshly-made, organic wedding cakes made with locally-sourced ingredients. Or your cakes may be gorgeous modern wedding cakes that taste as good as they look.
See a pattern here? These are not just goods you have, they are the details that make you awesome and special.
For the here’s how it will benefit you part. This is where you get into the psychology of your ideal bride. What are her biggest concerns, her deepest values, and her greatest wish for this part of her wedding?
Maybe you offer high-quality, low cost wedding photography by limiting your time or product line. Those details would go in the “Here’s what I have for you” section.
In the “How it will benefit you” section you might say that Your pricing allows the bride to have high-quality photos that she can cherish for years to come without the worry of blowing her budget.
When you’re talking about the benefits of your service or product, focus on your ideal bride and how she will feel rather on what product she will get in the end.
For the here’s what to do next part. While it’s crucial that you have a clear call to action (CTA) on every page, it’s even more crucial to have one on your home page. CTAs may vary from business to business, depending on your goals and sales funnel. When choosing your CTA it’s crucial that you know and understand your sales funnel.
For example, if you’re a cake baker, maybe you know that most brides book if they have a tasting with you, so you may want a bride to sign up for a complimentary cake tasting using your Schedule Once account. Or maybe your a wedding planner and know your website visitors are farther up the sales funnel and have a lot of questions about their wedding that must be answered before she makes a booking decision. In this case, you may want her to sign up to your email list where she’ll get a free 4-week mini-course for planning her wedding in your area. In the course of that time, you will email her through your auto-responder series, establishing your authority as a planner and trustworthiness as a vendor. At the end of that series, you can make an offer that will bring her closer to signing a contract such as a consultation, or a coupon.
Whatever you do, just be clear about how you want brides to move through your site. Think about what they’re looking for, and provide them with the guidance they need to get the information they want.
One last thing. The “Here’s what I have for you. Here’s how it will benefit you. Here’s what to do next” model is for internal reference. You don’t actually want to use those exact phrases in your web copy 🙂
2. Clean Clear Navigation
So you’ve taken the time to create an awesome homepage with clear information. You know what you have to offer, how it will benefit the bride, and what she should do next. This is good and will work for a majority of web users.
But here’s the rub: You can’t control what people will do on the internet.
A trend-setting bride may ignore your call to sign up for your email list. She wants to see your portfolio first. Similarly, a budget savvy bride may want to see your pricing first. In these instances, having clear navigation can help web users find exactly what they are looking for within one click of any page.
You should have at least five core pages and navigation items that give your potential bride enough clear information on any page on your site to find what she’s looking for. Use web conventions as your guide and at the very least include:
- Homepage
- Portfolio
- Services (or Products)
- About
- Contact
Remember, put yourself in your client’s shoes. They need to know who you are, what you do, and whether or not they can afford you. Your navigation must be clear. Clear is better than clever.
3. A Contact Page
While most wedding professionals have a contact page, they vary greatly in quality and usefulness. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve landed on a vendor’s website from a blog or Pinterest and could not figure out if they were in a region I’ve covered. Now think about that from a bride’s perspective. She’s planning a wedding in Burlington, VT. She wants a local florist. She finds your work on Pinterest. She can’t figure out where you’re located. She moves on to the next prospect.
Your contact page should make it ridiculously easy for a bride, colleague or media outlet to know where you are located and how to contact you in their preferred method. Include the following:
- Your location. I get it if you work from home and you don’t want brides (or just anyone showing up at your home unannounced). But at the very least show your city, state and region you serve. Even if you’re a destination wedding vendor, say where you are based out of. That way potential clients can get a sense of travel times and expenses.
- Your operating hours. If you have a storefront, this is when your business is open. If you’re working from home or a private studio, this is when you answer the phone and are at your computer responding to emails.
- Contact info in multiple forms. OK, so you have a contact form for clients. Great, but what if a publisher or news outlet wants to contact you? What about a colleague in your city that is inquiring on behalf of a client? That “Wedding Date” field that you require no longer makes sense. Better to include your email address and phone number so other people can contact you in the way they’re most comfortable. Afraid of spammers? Don’t hot link your email. Instead use this method: “For further inquires, feel free to email me at christie {at} mountainside-media {dot} com” Real humans will know what to do.
- Expected response time. According to the 2013 Global Study from Think Splendid, Millennial Brides, speediness of email replies is “very important” to 52% of brides, and speediness of phone replies was important to 43% of brides. Be sure to manage expectations by stating your response time on your contact page.
4. A Lead Generation System
A lead generation system is simply a way of continuing the conversation after a visitor has left your website by capturing contact info. The most common and effective lead generation tool is the email list. When a bride signs up for your email list, she’s raising her hand and saying, “I’m interested in what you’re offering and want to continue the conversation with you.”
By using email as a lead generation system, you acknowledge that a bride may need more time and information before making a purchase decision. After all, she’s spending the equivalent of a nice new car or a downpayment on a house on her wedding. They may be nervous about making the right choices or spending that kind of money. That’s where your email sequence comes in. You can start giving her the additional information she needs to make a purchase decision.
To Set up Your lead generation system you’ll need the following:
- An account on an email marketing platform like MailChimp, Constant Contact or Aweber. I use Aweber for it’s powerful auto-responder features, but I recommend MailChimp as an easy and intuitive system for beginners. I’ve also used Constant Contact but I find their platform expensive for what you get and their auto-responder system isn’t as robust or intuitive as Aweber’s or MailChimp’s.
- A strong call to action. I like to use an incentive. On this website I ask for your email address and then give you a quick start guide to doing market research. You may offer a guide to stunning vistas (photographer), a guide to the best venues (planner), or turn questions brides frequently ask you the most into an “Ultimate Guide to…” Of course, your call to action can be the email newsletter itself. The point is that you want to invite the bride to download or sign up for what ever you have.
- A Landing Page. This is a page dedicated to explaining more about your offer and contains your signup form. The “Here’s what I have for you, Here’s how it will Benefit you and here’s what to do next” model works well here. Most WordPress templates ship with a landing page template. If you want something more robust, there are a number of premium landing page plugins that work well, including Thrive Landing Pages, OptimizePress and Leadpages.
- A Signup Form. This is where your web visitor actually puts her name and email address into a form in order to opt in to your list and receive her download. You create your opt in form in your email marketing platform. Most landing page plugins allow you to integrate with your email marketing platform into the settings for easy form setup.
- A Thank You Page. After they’ve submitted their information, a Thank you page confirms that they have done so successfully and lets them know what to expect and any next steps. For example, my thank you page directs you to check your email and confirm that you want to be on my list.
- A Confirmation Email. In you confirmation email, thank the visitor for signing up and remind her of what she will get (i.e your download, an email sequence with steps for planning her wedding, a coupon, a free consultation, whatever you promised in your landing page, remind her here.)
- An Auto-responder Series. The easiest way to keep your business on a brides radar with minimal effort is by creating an email auto-responder series. You set up your auto-responder once and it emails the same sequence to you first subscriber as it does your 1000th subscriber. That way, you can actively market to your brides without being chained to your computer, sending out emails all the time. For example, say you’re a cake-baker and you know it takes six weeks for your potential clients to research and decide upon a baker for their wedding cake. You create a six-part tutorial that’s delivered every week for six weeks teaching the bride how to choose the right design, flavors and baker for her wedding. She keeps opening these emails for the amazing content, and you continue to win her trust and show yourself as an authority every week. Toward the end of the sequence you can start inviting her to call you for a consultation or come in for a tasting. This sequence is written once and then goes to work marketing on your behalf for every bride that signs up to you list. Now that’s powerful!
5. An About Us Page
To start, your about page should have your name and a current picture of you. If you have a staff, include their names and pictures too. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve visited a wedding business website, clicked on the about page and still had no idea who I should email with a question (I hate saying “Hi There” or “To Whom It May Concern”).
Your about page should also be about your web visitors as well as about you. Use it to reassure them that they are in the right place and that you can help them. In my about page on the Mountainside Bride, I make a connection with my readers and assure them that I know and understand them and that I can help them plan their mountain wedding. Is it about me. Sure. But it’s also about them. Similarly, my about page on this website is about helping you.
Finally, use your about page to encourage them to do something else, like sign up for your email list, follow you on social, or get in touch.
For a great article on writing an effective about page, check out “The 5-Step Process for Writing an About Page that Connects (and Converts)” by Copyblogger.
6. High Quality Images
According to the 2013 Global Wedding Survey by Splendid Insights, 62% of brides said that a portfolio was “very important” in their decision-making process. What should be in your portfolio? High-quality images.With that said, don’t neglect the rest of your website (or you blog). Every page should have at least one high-quality, professional image.
Guess what: as a wedding industry professional you can work with photographers in your region to get amazing photos of your work. Some photographers will offer you images of your work at weddings they shot for free as long as you include their watermark and or link back to them. You may also find your work published on wedding blogs.
If you can’t find a photographer who will share images with you, or you don’t want the weddings you’ve worked in your portfolio yet because you’re not yet attracting your ideal bride, have a photographer colleague come in and photograph you in your studio or storefront. Most photographer’s day rates for a photoshoot are quite reasonable.
If you must take your own pictures, invest in a decent camera (something other than your phone). Even a good point and shoot like the Canon Powershot will work nicely. Then LEARN HOW TO USE IT. If you have trouble slogging through a manual, consider taking a course such as Click Love Grow. I took that course to improve my blog tutorials and your can really see the difference from this to this.
7. Mobile Responsive Website
Again, according to Smart Insights:
- More than 20% of Google searches are done on a mobile device.
- 25% of Millennials access the internet on a mobile device exclusively (this includes my husband).
- 61% of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience.
Millennials are researching using their phones to search and browse the internet more and more, and Google knows this. In March of 2015, Google released a new algorithm update dubbed “Mobilegeddon” because it will downgrade old school websites that are not mobile responsive in mobile searches.
With 80% of all engaged couples being Millennials, it has become crucial for wedding professionals to have a mobile responsive website that offer Millennials a fantastic user experience and ensures google will rank you.
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