The Importance of Automation
Photo by Elizabeth LaDuca
During one of our recent mentoring sessions, a planner was explaining that she was getting bogged down by the day-to-day tasks that were taking too much time. While the short answer is to hire someone to handle those tasks for her, the reality is that most event planners are small businesses and it can take some time before this is feasible. So, instead of jumping to the conclusion of hiring someone, we worked with her to break down what the tasks were and why they were taking so much time. It became apparent that many of the tasks that were slowing her down could be fixed with automation, i.e. putting systems and processes in place to avoid repetitive, time consuming tasks.
Inspired by this session, today we’re sharing our top three ways to streamline your wedding and event planning business. Implementing these into your business plan will save you hours on repetitive tasks and give you more time to do the tasks you love!
Canned Email Responses
We are firm believers in canned, or saved, email responses. So many of the emails we send are repetitive. For example, emails to prospective clients, confirmation emails, reminder emails, and more! It’s worth putting in the time to create template emails for these that you can use over and over again, without the same level of thought. Unsure where to start? Head over to The Brilliant Boutique to the first to know when our email templates are available (hint: these are dropping in less than two weeks!!).
E-agreements and Digital Client Management
This is 2020. If you are not sending your clients an e-agreement for them to sign, you are wasting your time. Sending a contract to book a new client should take less than 5 minutes. We use Aisle Planner, which we love because it also gives us the ability to create a portal for each of our wedding clients. Everything is stored digitally. Do you waste time sending payment reminders? Aisle Planner does that for you. Is updating your client budgets a time suck? Yep, Aisle Planner does that, too. Aisle Planner doesn’t sponsor us (though they should!), but you can click here to receive 25% off your first 3 months of Aisle Planner.
Social Media
Do you find yourself spending hours trying to find photos that are the right color for your feed? It’s time to stop. Dedicate some time to go through your portfolio. Tag each image with the colors and a description of the content. Depending on your portfolio, this could take quite a bit of time, but it’s worth it when you can just type in the color you’re looking for an a ton of perfect images come up! It makes scheduling a breeze!
These are just a few of our time-saving tips to make your business run faster and they’re so easy to do! We’ve had a lot of questions on automating social media specifically, so we’ll expand a little more on that in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we still have two spots left for mentoring this year - email us if you’re interested in learning more about wedding and event planning mentoring.