How to Onboard Wedding Clients Using Flodesk
When you’re in the business of planning weddings and serving clients, you’re on a continual search for ways you can save time, create a better client experience, and streamline anything and everything with technology. From getting yourself on a CRM to shave time off getting contracts signed and deposits paid to trying to find that unicorn of a virtual assistant who is equally skilled at admin tasks and blog writing, it can sometimes be hard to see the forest through the trees—and some of the solutions you need that are right in front of you.
As a team of wedding pros ourselves, we know how much hinges on your client experience and onboarding process. In fact, it’s so important that most people assume everything about it needs to be super hands-on and high touch. The thing is, if taking that approach means you’re getting in your own way, it’s not actually an effective use of your time and energy—and it might be just the thing you need to think about automating. So today, we wanted to dive into the topic of client onboarding and share our thoughts about why you should consider putting this part of your process online. Read on to learn more about onboarding your wedding clients with Flodesk (because we use it to onboard members here at Sourced Co. and have all the tips to share)!
What is client onboarding?
Before we dive into the fun parts about using Flodesk, we thought it important to define client onboarding—because the phrase can mean different things to different people. Simply put, client onboarding is how you formally bring someone on as a client, and for the purpose of this conversation, we are going to say it starts after a couple has signed a contract with you.
Your onboarding process is how you kick off the planning process and it helps you deliver a consistent experience to every one of your clients. It includes welcoming your couples, setting expectations, establishing boundaries, familiarizing them with the tools you use as well as a few early check-ins to make sure they’re on the right track. Having a defined onboarding process is great for your couples because they learn about what to expect (and when) and a documented one is great for you because it keeps you from needing to reinvent the wheel every time (and letting things slip through the cracks).
Why you should think about automating parts of your client onboarding
There are a lot of things you are responsible for when you’re running a wedding planning business (or any business in the wedding or creative space). And, while you often read about why you should and how you can automate parts of your business’ admin or marketing tasks, there is less talk about how you can automate some of what you need to do with clients. But automating tasks that are repetitive is always something to think about since it frees you up to focus on the things that can’t be. Yes, it might take some work on the front end to get things set up, but your future self is sure to thank you since it reduces the number of things you need to put energy into.
What you can include in an onboarding workflow
There are some key parts of your onboarding process that you can automate, even if yours includes more or less than the planner next to you. Because, like we said before, you want to look for the repetitive parts of how you onboard your each of your clients and a way to get them done (without it being on your plate). Here are some ideas around what you can turn into a prescheduled onboarding sequence:
Your welcome email after a couple has signed a contract with you (though you might also want to still consider writing a personal one as well)
An email (or series) that introduces each of the online tools you’ll need the couple to use throughout the planning process (giving them tips and links to tutorials as well)
An email that sets expectations and boundaries (because you hate having the conservation in person anyways)
Emails for the important dates or milestones that every one of your couples has or check-ins that come at a specific time (this is easiest if you have a phased-based approach to wedding planning)
How to use Flodesk workflows to onboard wedding clients
Okay, now that we’ve hopefully sold you on the idea of automating parts of your client onboarding, we want to share our tips to help you do that in Flodesk! Why Flodesk? Let us count the ways:
Flodesk is super easy to set up and use all of their features
You can customize the settings to match your brand
It’s design driven and you can send emails that match the level of aesthetics your clients expect
It’s very affordable
It is founded and owned by a couple of badass women!
We use Flodesk to send all of our email newsletters as well as onboard our own new members with! It was incredibly easy to set up the workflow and that got us thinking about ways wedding planners and pros could take advantage of this platform. So, if you want to onboard your wedding clients using Flodesk, here’s how to start:
Create a segment of your audience (you need to do this first in order to attach your workflow to it); you can manually add new clients to this segment after they signs a contract with you or use something like Zapier to integrate with other software you might be using
Set up a new workflow; there are two pre-done workflows you can customize (Nurture and Welcome) but you can create one from scratch too
Assign a trigger (which is when the subscriber is added to the segment you created)
Design and write copy for each of the automated emails you want to include in your client onboarding sequence; don’t forget subject lines!
Set the time delay so your couples receive it when you want them to
Add an action at the end of the sequence that removes them from this segment of your email list since (in theory) they no longer need to be in it after receiving the last email (you can even have it add them to an offboarding segment that triggers an offboarding workflow!)
Pretty straight forward, huh? Having our onboarding sequence be automated in Flodesk has been a huge time saver for us and we think it can help you save time to! Be sure to scope out their email marketing platform and let us know if you want to chat more about it—we’re pretty obsessed and are here to share more about why!
