I believe that communication is important. Like, really really important.

I do most of my communication via email because it allows my brides and I to contact each other on our own time schedules. Brides are very busy people; they are juggling their careers, their calendars, and their emails because, remember, when they first contact you they have probably sent out 50 emails to different vendors: wedding planners, florists, venues, DJs, videographers, makeup artists, and other photographers. They are on Cloud 9 because of being recently engaged, but they are also starting to realize the work that will go into their amazing wedding…and The Cloud starts to dissipate because of the juggling of trying to line up so many things. To be frank, it’s stressful.

So I try to ease that stress in the best way that I can and that is by emailing them with quality information, in a friendly, warm tone (yes, even via email), and, maybe most importantly, as quickly as possible.

My rule of thumb is to reply to my brides, whether potential or already booked, within 12 hours. I am shocked to find out that some of my brides never heard back at all from a vendor or heard back days, weeks, and sometimes even months later. I don’t believe you can run a business successfully if you let emails build up without a plan or method of response. If email is not a good tool for you to respond with, I would recommend putting your phone number on your website instead so that the bride can call you directly. It is a huge disservice to leave a potential client hanging and I believe that so strongly that I’d even say you’re killing your own business by not responding.

After a bride contacts me initially about a wedding, I check my calendar.

If I’m already booked, I will send her an email to let her know. I will include in that email some of my personal recommendations for other photographers, people who I trust and who have a similar style to my own. No matter that the bride won’t be booking me, I want to give her a good experience with Emily Crall Photography. I had a bride contact me recently who didn’t end up hiring me. But she liked me so much that she recommended me to her friend who did book with me. Leaving a good impression with everyone is important. You shouldn’t just be catering to your own clients; be kind to everyone. You never know the connections that can come from it.

If the date is available, I email the bride back to let her know. (Either way, I’m communicating back with every inquiry I get.) I keep my emails warm & friendly. One of the easiest ways to do this is to let the bride know that I actually read her inquiry. It seems silly, but how many times do brides write a message in the “tell me about you” field and we glance over it just looking for their date? I want my brides to know that I care about them already as people. Sometimes they’ll write a bit about how they met, sometimes their hobbies, sometimes how they just got engaged the night before (my favorite!), and I like to include an acknowledgement to that in my response email.

One of the things I mention right away in my first email back to them is that I’d love to meet them for a consult and I ask them to let me know what time of day or day of the week works best.

I also include a link to my bridal lounge, which is a super secret website just for my potential brides. 🙂 It includes a whole bunch of information about me, my style and approach to a wedding day, my pricing, engagement sessions, what to wear for engagement sessions, vendors I think they’ll love working with, and so much more. In some ways, it’s an overabundance of information, but the beauty of having it as a website is that they can click around as much or as little as they want.

When the email is all put together, I send it and save the original in an email folder marked with that client’s date and their names. (Organization workflow will be an entirely different series, trust me.) It’s then up to the client to email me back to book their consult.

I don’t pester my brides with emails if I don’t hear back from them. Sometimes they’ve gotten the information they needed and have just decided I’m not right for them. I give my potential brides about a month to email me back after which time I move their email into my “expired” email folder. (I don’t delete them.)

I will say, whether coincidental or not, the couples who end up hiring me generally have a really quick response time. And then we start to collaborate our calendars to schedule a consult.

Coming up: Client Consults Pt 3: Scheduling the Consult