5 Ways for Wedding/Events Planners & Apps to Make More Money

If you were at the Wedtech conference last fall you probably saw my panel about how wedding/event planners and wedding apps can grow, scale and make money. After the show I got a lot of questions about how to implement the strategies to monetize websites, make more money with each wedding and event planning client as well as continue the revenue stream after the event is over.  I also got a lot of questions about monetizing wedding apps and planning tools.

If you were wondering or want to know more (these can be applied to almost any type of business so it is still relevant for you), here is a follow up post with 5 ways and 1 bonus strategy to help you make more with each client, potential clients and to monetize your wedding or event planning app.

This post is broken out into two parts:

1. Clean affiliate programs to work with
2. 5+ ways to make more money with your wedding/event business or app

How Wedding Affiliate Programs Can Help Businesses & Vendors Make Money

The thing to remember is that your clients need favors, decor, supplies, etc… for their event.  By having trusted partners you can send them to for the items that they need to buy anyways, you can earn a commission with little to no extra work.

Below you’ll find all of my current clean wedding affiliate programs (I start with what clean affiliate programs are) and the links to join the programs. Afterwards I share some strategies that you can start using today to create additional channels of revenue from each current, future and past client.

Here are my wedding clients that currently have clean affiliate programs:

• Bachelorette.com – 15.2% – Join Here.
• GiftBasketsOverseas.com – 10% base commission – Join Here.
• SmugMug (Photography storage, wedding websites & more) – 15% – Join Here.

What is a clean affiliate program?

A clean affiliate program is one that does not work with or has solutions to protect your commissions from sites that rank for the merchant’s url + coupons, adware like toolbars or trademark bidders.  This is very rare in the wedding niche which is why many event planners, app developers and others within the niche enjoy working with our programs over others. Below is one example of a common issue within affiliate marketing on how you can lose your commissions in a dirty affiliate program.

If you refer a client to a site and they arrive at a checkout page and see a coupon box, your client may go to Google or Yahoo to find a coupon code.  If the websites that show up for the merchant name + coupons are active affiliates, you will probably lose your commission since your tracking cookie may be replaced, and if it is, you will lose sale to the partner that ranked for url + coupons. That’s why we don’t work with them, and if we do we have leapfrogging and other solutions to make sure you get credit and the little to no value adding partner does not.

So now that you know what a clean program is, how do you use this to make money with your event/wedding planning company or app?  This is the easy part!

5 Easy Strategies For Event or Wedding Planners & Apps to Make More Money

1. Use Wedding Affiliate Programs to Create an Online Shop (no coding needed).

The simplest way to make money from current clients is to send them a url on your website or have a shopping section in your app. Once they land on this page, you can do a few things.

• You can list the websites with the wedding affiliate programs you’ve joined and a banner that says click here and describe what they sell. (This is the least profitable way)
• The next option is to list the stores in the left hand side. Once people click on the store name, take them to a page that features your favorite products from that store in a grid with a banner across the top. This can be done in minutes with no coding by using the free make-a-page tool if the program is on ShareASale.
• If you can code or have a programmer, pulling the datafeeds from each of my clients and entering them into a database will give you access to thousands of products which you can list within your site. You can allow people to search them, sort them and then click through to the vendor website to shop. This is the best way and helps keep your clients coming back to your site for more options since there are numerous resources there. If you cannot code, there are copy and paste tools like PopShops that you can use to do this.

2. Create And Monetize a Newsletter List (it’s easy and no programming needed)

If you have previous client email addresses, you’re ready to start making money with repeat clients and helping them with anniversaries and holidays.

Because you helped with their events, you know when their anniversaries are, and you know when holidays they’ll celebrate like Valentine’s are.  By using this knowledge, you can begin to drive repeat business and sales. If you don’t already have an email or newsletter service, I highly recommend you try this one. Once you have an email system or service set up follow these steps.

1. Create lists like anniversary in (insert month), all clients, event planning (insert type of event), married in (insert month and/or year).
2. Once you’ve added the clients to this list, set up a templated message congratulating them on their anniversary, about celebrating Valentine’s, etc…
3. Go into the programs I manage and find relevant products for the anniversaries, holidays or events. They could be first or second anniversary gifts, flowers and champagne, lingerie for Valentine’s or party favors for a 1st or second birthday, then add them into the newsletters. You could also use banners on the top or bottom, etc… Here is a post with multiple ways to make money from a newsletter.
4. Now set the emails up to automatically launch when it’s the right time. You could do Valentine’s emails in late January, anniversary newsletters the month before and if it’s new clients, here are some stores to look at for ideas for your wedding.

These 4 easy steps can help you to earn revenue each month and every year after from your happy clients.  It helps keep them updated with cool ideas for their anniversaries, helping to take the trouble out of shopping for holidays and also keeps you in front of them for future parties, weddings and events so that they can hire you again!

3. Monetize Your Lead And Contact Forms

What happens when someone contacts you through a form for wedding photography, events planning or even an anniversary cake?  They get through the form and land on your homepage or on a thank you page. This space can be used to make money from leads that don’t convert into clients, or even make money before the person becomes a client with your company.

Once the person has filled out your form, take them to your normal thank you page and under the part where you let them know you’ll be in contact, say something like “Don’t forget to check out our trusted partners for your wedding/bachelorette/event type needs.”  Now you can show a banner and a short description, show your favorite products for the event type if you have different pages for weddings, bachelorette parties, etc…

The more relevant and sometimes the best selling products tend to do better; but it really depends on your website and the types of leads that come through.  This page normally sits empty and is the perfect opportunity for you to make money, especially on leads that don’t convert into sales.

4. Use The Automated Response Email From Your Contact Page

This is a huge space that not many people use. When you automatically send an email to let a lead know that you received their inquiry, you can say “Check out these cool products for the perfect (insert event type)”. If it’s a bachelorette party, show some of the most popular games, accessories, etc… If it’s a wedding, show popular favors, decor and other things that complement but don’t compete with your own services. This is a very easy and often missed opportunity for event planners and event vendors to earn additional revenue.

5. Shop Through Your Affiliate Links

The goal of an affiliate program is to bring in new customers or bring back customers who have not shopped in a long time. Because you already have new clients or users on a regular basis, and either you or your clients need to buy supplies, why not join our programs and shop through your affiliate links when it is allowed.

You shopping for your clients is virtually the same as you sending them to shop through your links.  The biggest difference is you can guarantee the click and the sale completes so you earn the commission.  It also gives you a few options.

The % of the commission can be additional revenue for you, or you can apply all or part of it as a discount to your clients. Some programs offer coupons as well which helps you earn even more margin off so you can make more or pass on more savings to your clients. If you have to buy the products anyways, why not earn commissions on them too by shopping through your affiliate links?

Thank you again for reading and I’m always here to help create a custom strategy for you with my client’s affiliate programs.  Here they are again so that you don’t have to scroll all the way to the top to join.

• Bachelorette.com – 15.2% – Join Here.
• GiftBasketsOverseas.com – 10% base commission – Join Here.
• SmugMug (Photography storage, wedding websites & more) – 15% – Join Here.

6. Bonus – Use Each Merchant Individually

One bonus way to make additional money for wedding or event planners and apps is to think about the individual types of weddings or events.  If your focus is on international or destination weddings, you can use companies like my client GiftBasketsOverseas.com to provide resources for the guests to send gifts to almost anywhere in the world.   By having the shopping portal from the first part, the wedding guests can give a gift that the couple can use, not have to pack to bring back and that can also make their wedding/honeymoon even more enjoyable.   Now you only have to create the page and send it to your client to send to their guests and you can start earning commissions.  The thing to remember with this strategy is to have a page that solves a solution like what types of gifts are good and do not create issues for couples having a destination wedding.