Some people call me an OG of wedding business marketing, but deep down I'm just another person wearing PJ bottoms on Zoom. I swear a lot, I share my struggles, and I don't pretend to be better than anyone else.
Want to stop getting ghosted in your wedding business?
I get it, getting ghosted is frustrating as hell and can leave you wondering what you’re supposed to do. The good news is there are some really simple things you can do that will help you stop getting ghosted and book more weddings.
In this episode, I’ll walk you through 9 common mistakes wedding professionals make that set them up to be ghosted. Address these mistakes and you’ll be on your way to a ghost-proof wedding business.
What are the 9 mistakes wedding pros make that cause ghosting and how can you finally stop getting ghosted? Listen to this episode to find out!
Hello there, my friend. I am your host as always, Heidi Thompson, here helping wedding professionals of all different kinds book more of the clients they really want to be working with following a simple roadmap and building businesses that give you the freedom and flexibility that you’re after.
So today I wanna talk to you about a topic that I get asked about a lot. Now, many wedding professionals are getting ghosted that is such a chronic thing in our industry, and one of the biggest questions I get is why? Why is this happening?
And then, of course, the next logical question is, and how do I make this stop? How do I stop getting ghosted? And there are a lot of reasons, to be honest, but most of the reasons that I see are good things here. So when I say that, I mean we can change things, we can address them, we can fix these things.
Now there are some things that are just gonna be out of your control and we just have to accept that unfortunately. But there are so many things that you can do to address this, and that’s really great news. A lot of these things are actually quite easy to fix.
And there’s an interesting misconception I see in our industry about ghosting. A lot of people think ghosting is something that happens after they have an inquiry. And clearly, the person didn’t like something they saw and so they stopped responding.
Or maybe you had a consultation and then the person stopped responding. That’s not actually true, and that’s why a lot of people keep getting ghosted because they’re focusing on that tail end, that communication when really so much ghosting happens because of something that goes wrong before they ever reach out to you to begin with, the expectations that your website sets or doesn’t set has a huge impact on whether someone will ghost you later or not.
And you have to address this if you want to stop getting ghosted. So let’s talk about why you’re getting ghosted and how you can stop getting ghosted.
Now, one of the biggest reasons wedding professionals are getting ghosted is because they’re not giving any indication of price. And I know for a long time in our industry there have been people that will tell you that you shouldn’t give any indication of price. My experience over the past almost 12 years now has been that that is not true for most wedding professionals.
And I’m not necessarily saying that you have to list out all of these prices like it’s a menu. But what happens is when you don’t give any indication of price on your website at all, the first question people are going to ask is gonna be related to price. Because that’s where there is a gap in information.
You’re intentionally omitting that they wanna make sure that you fall within their budget before going any further. And that makes perfectly logical sense. It doesn’t mean that that’s the thing that they value most.
It means that you haven’t given them the information they need to know whether or not it’s worth going through the effort of having a conversation only to find out that you’re completely outside of their budget. That’s frustrating. That can be embarrassing. Nobody wins.
And I will say that with Gen Z becoming more and more and more of our market, we’re seeing an even bigger emphasis on transparency and an unwillingness to deal with a lack of transparency. So if you’re hiding your prices, you’re going to get ghosted more often. You’re setting yourself up for that by requiring them to ask that question in order to even find out if you’re in their range at all.
And something I think a lot of people don’t realize until you look at your own behavior is a lot of people won’t get in touch at all if there’s no indication of pricing. So you may be losing a lot of clients by omitting prices. Now this doesn’t mean that you’re Amazon and there are prices all over the place.
You can choose to provide your pricing on your website with context, and I’ll get to that next about what I mean by that context. Or you could opt to give a guideline, a baseline for people to at least have an understanding of what they should be expecting. And this is a great way to weed out people who aren’t qualified and would never pay what you’re charging because a lot of times the people who are ghosting you are the people who would’ve never contacted you to begin with if they knew about your pricing.
So you’re creating more work for yourself and creating more ghosting for yourself. It also helps your potential clients set their expectations because like I said, expectations are everything, especially when it comes to money.
Now, if I’m gonna go buy a Ferrari, I have a general idea of what that’s gonna cost me. I’m not gonna be shocked by the price. That’s a very different situation than going to buy, you know, a base model Prius. But that’s the thing about pricing. Numbers mean absolutely nothing without context is a million dollars a lot. I don’t know what is it for. Is it for dinner? Yeah, that’s an insane amount.
Is that for a private island in a jet? I don’t know. This sounds like kind of a steal, especially considering here in San Diego, that’s like the price of a lot of not so great houses. So instead of straight up stating your prices, you can opt for a guideline that sets an expectation.
And it could be something like, our prices start at X, our average price is X, and our typical couple spends between X and Y. Then at least this potential client can determine if you’re in the ballpark without them drawing too many conclusions about your prices and without you having the opportunity to build value with them during the inquiry and the sales process.
Now, this is really great for wedding professionals who have a custom approach to pricing. So if you’re a florist, if you’re a designer, if you do things that you really can’t have set prices because everything is different and the cost varies wildly, and you’ve wondered, okay, how do I set this sort of expectation? This is how you do it. You don’t have to give an exact price, you can give a ballpark, you can give an estimate, you can give a minimum, you can give a typical spend.
And ultimately like anything, you have to test this out to see what’s going to work for you in your market. So don’t be afraid to test it and see what happens. You can always change it. Nobody’s gonna notice I think we think everybody’s looking at everything we do all the time, and that is definitely not the case.
This brings me to the second reason why so many wedding professionals I meet are getting ghosted. And that’s that you’re not selling to them on your service page, you haven’t made the case for your value before they even inquire.
I would say this is something I see 90% of wedding professionals struggle with, whether they realize it or not. And it’s something we talk about a lot inside my membership, The Wedding Business Collective, because your service page should actually do most of the selling for you. And in fact, there are plenty of people who you know may not even need to get on the call for you to make a sale.
Or the call is really just to confirm that you’re the right choice, you’re the right personality fit to answer a question or two. Inside The Wedding Business Collective, we have this training called Service Pages That Sell with Ashlyn Carter. It is a killer training by an amazing copywriter that walks you through what a service page needs to include if you want it to sell for you. And like I said, at least 90% of wedding professionals are not doing this.
So it’s a huge opportunity for you to get a leg up on your competition. Now, how does this relate to presenting your price? Now, if you are just putting your price on your website without any context of the benefits of what customers are going to get from you, of basically why it’s worth this price, you become the person who’s focused on price, not them.
It only makes sense that they’re going to focus on price because that’s all you’ve given them to focus on. You’ve made it your price page and not your service page. Your service page doesn’t have anything about the value that you deliver.
Your service page is your lawyer that’s going forward and making the case for you. You know, this is your Elle Woods moment to make the case about why what you’re selling is worth actually so much more than the price so that it feels like a steal. This is what a service page that sells focuses on.
And like I said, this comes up time and time again in The Wedding Business Collective. This is why I do member makeovers. I go through one member’s website once a month and record my screen and talk through what they can do to improve. And almost every single website I’ve done hundreds of these has this exact issue.
So if you’re in this boat, you’re not alone and it can be hard to figure out exactly what you are supposed to do without some help. So I have some information about how you can get some help for a really discounted price toward the end of this. So stay tuned. If you need to improve your service page so that it actually does the selling for you, you’re gonna love this.
Now, your service page shouldn’t just be like a menu of bullets. It needs to sell. It needs to build context around why those bullets, why those features matter. So if you’re a photographer, and I notice the two types of wedding professionals who are the worst about this are planners and photographers. So an example for a photographer, if you say on your service page, okay, this is 10 hours of coverage, this is this price.
I don’t know what the fuck that means. If I don’t know anything about planning a wedding, if I don’t know anything about what’s normal, if I’m not a photographer, if I’m a bride that is just getting into this, I have no clue whether that’s a lot, that’s a little, that’s too much.
So I have no way to evaluate if that price is worth it. It’s like you’re trying to sell a Ferrari and you’re not telling me about the Ferrari. So if instead you rewrote that, as you know, we’ll be there to capture you and your partner having you know, a great morning with your friends getting ready and we’ll still be there when your dad has had a few too many drinks and starts busting out his dance moves, we capture that all.
That’s the kind I take my money feeling you want your service page to have. I want to buy. I’m not even really being sold at that point. I want the thing that you’re saying that you can provide.
And that to me is worth what you’re asking. So that is a really, really big change. And when people make these changes on their service pages, it changes everything. It really is amazing.
You can get more bookings and less ghosting by improving that single page on your website.
Like I said, these changes are not, you know, things that are gonna take you forever. They’re within your control for you to do something.
Now, the third reason why a lot of wedding pros are getting ghosted is that they’re not pre-qualifying. And what I mean by that is when I go to your website, it’s not clear who you’re for, who you work with specifically, what you do, why you’re different. So there are some questions you need to ask yourself here.
Are you getting ghosted because you’re attracting the wrong people? That is entirely possible.
You’re just attracting people that don’t value what you’re offering. And if I’m gonna give you a little tough love here, that’s not their fault. That’s yours. That’s how you have built your website because you are the one who has to decide how to market your business and who your ideal client is.
And I talk about ideal clients all the time. I approach it differently. I’ve written a book on the topic called Clone Your Best Clients. And I want you to focus on who your ideal client is as a human being. And not just demographics. Demographics are useless to us.
We need to focus on the person, we need to know what they care about, what they love, what they hate, and what they’re anxious about. Because your ideal client is a whole person.
Marketing is all about psychology. So we need to understand what’s going on in their head. They’re not a bride, they’re not a groom. These are roles they play for a given day in their lives. But the values that a person has, the things that they care about, they carry those throughout their entire life.
And the reason why those are so important is they directly influence our consumer behavior. You know, look at where you choose to shop and where you choose not to shop. You make those decisions based on your values. The key to marketing effectively is really understanding that your ideal client has these values that they hold and using them in their marketing to show them that, hey, that thing you want. Yeah, I got it.
So that example I gave you before the photographer talking about, you know, we’re gonna be there from when you’re getting ready to when you’re dad is busting out his dance moves.
So if your marketing doesn’t line up with who your ideal client is, they don’t care about that. If they don’t value that, if that’s not the problem that they want you to solve, they’re not gonna buy from you.
So I want you to think about this. I want you to work on crafting a statement of I am the insert. What you do for couples who insert what they care about, insert what they value, insert the thing they all have in common.
Another question you need to ask yourself here is, are you making yourself a commodity? Are you blending in? Now if you’re just another planner, just another floral designer, just another stationer in your city, couples are gonna compare you to everyone else. And the only differentiating factor at that point is price. So of course they’re gonna focus on that. It’s not that they went into it to focus on that, it’s that nobody differentiating themselves forces them into this position.
Now, if you are the photographer for couples who love their tattoos and wanna show them off and not cover ’em up in their wedding photos, and they’re all things offbeat bride, or if you’re the go-to planner for couples that wanna get married in France, don’t speak a lick of French, I almost said Spanish of French, but they know that that’s where they want to be.
That’s the thing that’s really important to them. You put yourself into your own category and it allows you to own that category. So all of a sudden you’re not any old photographer or videographer, DJ, planner, you are the clear best choice for your ideal client. There’s the vanilla that is everybody else, and there’s you. So who do you want to be? The go-to person for that needs to ooze out of every facet of your marketing.
I need to see it in five seconds when I land on your website. All of this has to come across before the inquiry, or you are totally setting yourself up to get ghosted. And these are small but incredibly powerful, incredibly impactful changes that you can make that actually can help you stop ghosting.
Now let’s talk about what happens after someone inquires. What a lot of wedding professionals do is they throw too much information, they just like vomit information on their lead. I see so many wedding pros do this and I get why you’re doing it. You wanna give people the information they asked for, you wanna make sure they have the information that they need.
But there’s a big difference between what people need to take the next step and what they may think they need. So we’re in an industry where people have probably never done this sort of thing before.
They’ve never hired an officiant, they’ve never hired a caterer, they don’t know what they’re doing, quite frankly. So they might ask you for a brochure, they might ask you for your pricing, they’re asking you for what they think they need, but you and I both know that’s not what they need.
The entire purpose of your inquiry process should be to take them by the hand and guide them, respond with questions, be curious, open up conversation, get the information you need from them in order to give them what they actually need. Share how you work with people, not just, here’s a brochure, here’s some pricing. Make a decision.
You wanna have a conversation. And that’s where I see a lot of wedding professional professionals struggle is they’re trying to jump to this point where people are ready to make a purchasing decision, but they don’t have the information they need and they also don’t know what information they need.
So if you’re a florist, okay, what time of year are you getting married? How many people are going to be at the wedding? What kind of design are we talking about here? All of these things can allow you to get into a consultative position where you are the expert, you’re having a conversation, and then you can guide them. And that’s really what we want when we hire someone.
This allows you to show up as an expert and not just be like, yeah, here’s a brochure, because ultimately that’s not what they need. They don’t just need like pages and pages of information and that’s going to blend in with everyone else and it’s going to overwhelm them. So they’re going to default to making a decision based on price, and that’s definitely not what you want.
Which leads me to number five here. And that’s asking to change the medium of conversation to a higher level of commitment too soon you’re moving in way too fast.
So I want you to make sure that you’re aligning your responses with their expectations in a normal conversation pattern. So if you email the service provider and ask some questions and then they responded to you and said, let’s set up a call, I actually just had this happen to me recently.
Someone just gave me this vague like, let’s set up a call. I was like, no, <laugh>, you didn’t answer my questions. And then when you do answer my questions, where can I easily and accessibly click to schedule a call with you? I’m just, just gonna randomly call you. You know, I’m, I’m just not gonna do that. I’m a millennial, that’s not gonna happen.
I love Calendly and TidyCal for this to allow people to set up a call at their convenience so you don’t have that back and forth. Like, does this work for you? Does this time work for you? And you’re not gatekeeping. Answer their questions, ask them questions, have that conversation in email, in text, however it came in.
And then you can build to a point where you can say, let’s set up a call to discuss exactly what you need and then I’ll be able to let you know exactly what the price is going to be because it’s gonna between be between X and Y. But it really depends on these things.
We wanna set expectations because if you don’t set the expectation of well, it’s gonna depend on these things, it feels like you know it’s gonna be this super salesy conversation, you also don’t wanna just blindside somebody with a number they weren’t expecting. All the more reason to set that expectation before they even inquire. Now, if someone is contacting you via email, respond to them via email.
Don’t, you know, immediately pick up the phone and call them. I know that’s like some things some old-school people recommend. If someone did that to me immediately, no, I’m never buying <laugh> anything from you. I am an older millennial, I would be completely turned off by that and I’m pretty sure everyone younger than me would too. I had a realtor do that to me and I was like, oh no, that’s too much.
I asked you a question and I sent you an email with a question and you called me. That’s acceptable to me. You don’t know this person. And now you’re asking them to set time aside to potentially have what in their mind might be an uncomfortable sales conversation. So make sure that you are responding to their questions and adding value and that you are not making the next mistake, which is dead-ending the conversation.
A lot of people will end their emails with something fluffy, I guess like I look forward to hearing from you soon. That stops the conversation.
So instead of ending with a sentence that really does nothing for anybody, ask them a question to keep the dialogue going and make that be the last sentence on the line of its own in a completely different paragraph.
That can be a low-commitment conversation. I’m not saying be like, are you ready to book? Or something like that. It could be, you know, oh, I love the venue that you said you’re getting married at. Are you planning on getting married at their indoor location or their outdoor location?
That is a great way to continue the conversation because most people aren’t ready to just jump into a call. They have to build a little bit of rapport. It’s like if you just met somebody at a bar, you wouldn’t immediately rush into something with them because they don’t know you yet.
You have to have that rapport, that human connection is really important, especially in sales. So even though it’s sales, it’s still a conversation between human beings and we have to keep that in context of commitment level. Sending an email to somebody replying to that email. Very low commitment. Same with text messaging. And it’s also the expectation that I’m going to get the response in the medium I sent it in.
If I sent you a text, if I sent you an email, don’t just call me. That’s weird <laugh> and it’s not gonna work. Number seven, and I really hate when I see this ’cause it’s such an easy mistake to make, is you aren’t giving them clear next steps. So I said, a lot of people will end their emails with, let me know if you have any questions.
So when you’re having that conversation ending in a question and keeping that process going is great, but once they have expressed interest, tell them what to do next.
Tell them what your process is. If you have a page that lays that process out even better, you can send them there so they can see exactly how this is going to work. Or you can lay it out in an email so you could say, you know when you’re ready you can click here to schedule a call and from there we’re gonna do this, this, and this. And then afterward I’ll send you this.
You’re setting expectations. So much of avoiding ghosting is setting expectations. Just give them what the next step is. When we hire a professional to do anything, we expect them to guide us. You’re kind of the Yoda here. You take them by the hand and lead them through things because you are the expert. So tell them what are the next steps. If you can provide your process and make it really clear for them, great.
That’s even better for this coming generation. But none of us like unknowns, none of us don’t like knowing what’s happening next. That’s why we have tracking on our food delivery, we’ve tracking on our grocery delivery, we have tracking on everything because people want to know what is happening. When this is gonna happen, then this is going to happen. It builds trust knowing that there is a process and it doesn’t take up a part of my mind that just kind of leads to anxiety.
Now, there may be places where you’re dropping the ball and you could actually save a lot of leads and eventually convert them. And that’s why you’re getting ghosted is it’s not that they don’t wanna work with you, it’s that they’re not ready. They got engaged, they got excited. I totally do this. Maybe they’re just not ready to pull the trigger.
And if you know this or if they just straight up tell you, that’s fine because you can nurture them because they’ve already expressed an interest. Don’t let them slip away. This is huge.
Instead, you could use email marketing to educate them to provide helpful content. And as they’re going through the process, just doing that alone is gonna set you apart from your competitors. Because most wedding professionals don’t do this. They don’t have any sort of nurturing process, whether it’s, you know, before the inquiry or when you get the inquiry and they’re not ready or even after the inquiry. This is a huge opportunity.
These are people that are already coming to you. So use email marketing to nurture them, to warm them up, to let them get to know you. Let them start to trust you. This is why I’m such a big fan of email marketing and a lot of people miss out on it in our industry because they see email marketing as something you do after a sale in order to make more sales.
But it’s actually much more powerful in this nurture phase where you’re popping back up in their inbox, keeping them informed, helping them, and then when they’re ready, who do you think they’re going to turn to? Chances are it’s gonna be the person that has been helping them all along the way.
Now another thing that leads to ghosting is a lack of urgency or scarcity. So I’ve written about this on my blog. I wrote a blog called How to Book More Weddings Post Covid, a link to it in the show notes because it has some really specific examples. But let me define these two terms for you. So urgency is a time-related pressure to do something. Christmas is coming that compels you to do your Christmas shopping that maybe you’ve been putting off for weeks. There’s a deadline there.
Urgency is a very powerful psychological trigger that is deeply rooted in our brains. It’s why deadlines work and it creates loss aversion and fomo. It’s actually really interesting psychologically, and when faced with urgency, you have to make the decision about how comfortable you are letting an opportunity get away from you. So like showing up at Christmas with no gifts for anyone, that is a powerful psychological driver.
And there have been tons of studies to show that we actually feel losses more than gains. Even the idea of that loss can make you cringe and be like, okay, I’m not procrastinating anymore. It’s really crazy. It’s the thought of pain of losing something psychologically. It’s about twice as powerful as the pleasure and excitement of gaining something.
People are willing to take more risks to avoid a loss than to experience a gain. So if you’ve ever watched a game show that has like an all or nothing, like you can bet it all for something you know next, they have a real hard time with this because you have to face the risk of losing it.
But then you also have to face the risk of what if, what if I didn’t do it? What if I let this opportunity get away and they’ll almost always risk it to potentially win more because that feeling of I could have done that and I didn’t, does not sit well with us. Now that’s urgency. Scarcity on the other hand is related to availability. There is only a hundred available. There’s only four items in stock.
This makes us take action because we put value on things that are scarce and they’re willing to pay more when things are scarce. And I’m sure you have had that feeling to rush to buy something that you know has a scarce quantity, like concert tickets like like tickets for a particular flight, like a new phone that’s coming out because you’re afraid the supply is going to run out and you’ll miss out.
Like I said, we hate missing out on things as humans. And these are really powerful psychologically, and you see it a lot in marketing. They have to be used authentically of course, and they can be used ethically. Most companies use either some form of urgency or scarcity sometimes in a way that’s gross and off-putting. But you’ll see this everywhere.
Now, you can of course, set a deadline for a promotion that you’re running. Just don’t lie about that and let people in. You see this with digital products sometimes, like an ebook and there’s only so many in stock and it’s like, yeah, but it’s a, it’s an ebook. So how does that work? So you can add authentic, ethical urgency and scarcity into your inquiry replies because those things are very real.
Your availability is limited. This is not something that is unlimited. And of course they’re working toward a specific date, so they need to book.
Something I love seeing is, you know, put together a quote as part of your inquiry process and attach a deadline to that or say that you’ll hold the date for a certain amount of time and make it clear that you know, this is my only date in August. The next I have is at the end of September. So if you wanna get married in August, make sure you go ahead and book this. I can hold it for this many days.
And of course people can change their minds, they can hire someone else and there’s going to be just an element of ghosting you can’t do anything about because people are people and they’re gonna do what they wanna do. So the best thing to do for yourself is to accept that there are a lot of changes that you can make and it can drastically cut down the ghosting that happens to you.
But ultimately sometimes people will just decide you’re not for them. They’re going to change their mind and that is totally fine. You shouldn’t have the expectation. ’cause remember, expectations are everything. You shouldn’t have the expectation that you’re going to close a hundred percent of the inquiries that come through.
And I would actually say if you’re doing that, it probably means that you need to raise your price. That’s a whole other conversation. I just want you to be prepared for the inevitability that you make these changes and you still get ghosted every now and then because people got excited and they inquired and now they’re just not interested or they’re not coming back.
I don’t want you to feel like that’s any judgment on you or that you know you should feel upset toward that person. So don’t take it too harshly. And instead what I would encourage you to do is look at what you can control everything we just talked about.
You can control these things, whether it’s fixing your service page or pre-qualifying or giving an indication of price or using authentic urgency or scarcity or setting expectations. If you address these things, you are going to minimize the number of people that wind up ghosting you, but it’ll probably never be zero. And that’s totally okay.
And I know everyone loves to complain about this. I’m the type of person who, don’t get me wrong, I love to complain, but at a certain point I have to do something. I need to focus on what I can control and what I can impact and how I can improve the situation. So I look at these things that I can control.
And in this situation, it’s true. You can’t control everything, but you can control a lot, you can improve a lot, and that’s really exciting if you ask me, there are a lot of ways that you can improve and the only way for you to go from here is up, which is pretty exciting.
It’s a huge opportunity for you and your business. Just make sure that you are addressing these mistakes and I wanna hear from you.
Which of these are you going to take action on first? Shoot me a DM on Instagram. I’m @evolveyourweddingbusiness over there. I love hearing from podcast listeners.
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That link, again is www.evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/bf. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in today. I can’t wait to hear from you over on Instagram and I will speak to you again very soon.
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The Wedding Business Collective
Episode #257: How To Know When It’s Time To Raise The Prices In Your Wedding Business
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