Text Messaging Ideas for Wedding & Event Planners

Modern consumers show a clear preference for dealing with businesses by text, and this trend is only set to grow with generations raised in the digital era. Wedding and event planners need to adapt the way they communicate with clients to meet this demand. In addition to helping you attract more customers, text messaging can improve the quality of your service and make your events run more smoothly.

Connecting With New Clients

Text messaging is a useful tool for staying in touch with leads and potential clients. On average, people check their phones 150 times a day, while checking their emails less than four times a day. This makes it a great way to send your subscribers suggestions for their future events such as wedding venues and catering options, or discounted offers with a sense of urgency. By personalizing these offers and suggestions according to clients’ needs and location helps ensure your messages are relevant and useful for each lead.

Raise Brand Awareness

Texting also enables the use of creative marketing campaigns to increase awareness of your business and put you in contact with potential clients. For example, 84444.com hosts a scavenger hunt content rewarding the winner with an engagement ring worth up to $10,000. Participants use text keywords to answer questions in order to solve each challenge and eventually win the ring. This contest puts the jeweler in contact with hundreds of engaged couples.

Improve Lead Follow-Up

Text messaging is a great way to follow up with leads after events and trade shows, letting you easily send personalized welcome messages to new leads who gave you their number. By creating SMS templates for each situation, you can send personalized messages to groups of leads in moments. You can also provide text codes so that anyone who sees your business at an event can easily text to subscribe or get more information.

Planning Events With Text Messaging

Text messaging can help you make event arrangements efficiently. If your clients are too busy to take calls it can be difficult to discuss potential wedding venues and other issues that need their approval. This can leave you spending too much time trying to get in touch with your clients, and could mean clients aren’t able to book the perfect venue in time. Text messaging helps you to reduce the stress of organizing weddings and events in busy periods. Instead, you can simply text clients with a selection of venues and they can respond with their preferences or ask for details using text codes for an automated reply.

Tracking Responses

In addition, text messaging can be used to send invitations and automatically track RSVPs. This can give you accurate updates on the number of guests so you can start making arrangements sooner, and enables you to keep clients in the loop on who'll be attending. Text messaging also lets you contact guests to request important information such as allergies and diet restrictions so you can plan accordingly.

Updating Clients & Guests

Codes

By creating codes guests can text for extra information about the event, text allows you to automate responses to a wide range of queries. This can reduce the time you need to spend responding to questions and calls from clients and attendees, receiving their queries through a dedicated business number for text instead of having your personal phone ringing all the time. Automated text messages boost your productivity by letting you focus on your work without leaving clients waiting for a reply.

Guest Menu Choices

You can even use texting to take guests’ menu choices and book transport to the venue, which can be useful when you need responses from a large number of guests. Tracking these responses through text makes it easy to keep your client informed of progress so they know who you still haven’t heard from and get assurance as soon as a planning milestone is complete.

Reminders

Text reminders are useful if your clients have additional appointments before the event such as outfitter and stylist bookings before a wedding, ensuring they're ready for the appointments on time and avoiding a delay to the event schedule. Text reminders can reduce missed appointments by as much as 40%.

Keeping Events Running Smoothly

Text messaging can be used to improve the experience of your event for guests. For example, you could enable guests to text in their music requests. After the event, text messaging makes it easy to contact guests to let them know as soon as the event photos are ready, with a helpful link to the photos.

In addition to communicating with your clients and guests, text messaging is a very useful tool for coordinating your staff and event teams. It can be difficult for your teams to respond to a phone call during a busy event, but texting can help keep your staff updated.

Schedule Changes

For example, if you need to delay transport to the wedding for an important guest who's running late. Texting lets you handle critical situations like schedule changes or staff shortages without constant phone calls taking your attention away from other aspects of the event. HARC Entertainment uses text messaging to efficiently book entertainers and organize their schedules. This practice has helped their shows run on time and enables them to quickly replace entertainers who have to cancel.

Mailing Lists

Furthermore, you can create separate mailing lists for each of the teams working on your event. Not only does this let you quickly send messages to all the relevant people, but you can schedule alerts and reminders in advance. This can reduce the pressure of needing to manage multiple teams at a fast-moving event, as they'll get reminders for each part of the schedule without your input. 

Text messaging can keep your clients in the loop more effectively than other methods. It also helps to streamline many aspects of planning your events and keeping guests informed. Furthermore, text messaging is a vital communication tool for managing multiple teams across busy events.