We’re the first week into a new year. For many wedding suppliers, this is a super busy time of year. 2018 couple begin to finalise their wedding plans and organised 2019 couples start to secure their chosen suppliers. This leads to a surge in emails and enquiries for a lot of wedding professionals. At the moment we are switching on the computer every day to several new wedding enquiries and often emails from existing couples too. A majority of this is on top of our usual admin. It’s also a busy time of year for confirming engagement shoot dates or locations and final payments as well.
We know that our experience is also the case for wedding suppliers across the board. Across all sectors, this is a very busy time of year. In addition to the surge in correspondence suppliers may be dealing with a slight admin backlog if they have been closed over Christmas and New year. And if that wasn’t quite enough, the tax return deadline is also looming in a couple of weeks. The result? Small businesses owners are rather goggle eyed and stuck at a computer for most of the day at the moment.
It’s safe to say that most of us have our hands full!
As such, if you’re getting organised this month please anticipate that there may be a slight delay in correspondence from suppliers. At the moment we are caught up and totally up to date- but we didn’t close over the Christmas period. If we had, our usual response time would have no doubt increased.
Furthermore, if you wedding planning and will be contacting suppliers for the first time, we have some advice for you. Please, please, please check your junk or spam folder for replies. A lot of small business emails sadly get wrongly flagged as spam by email hosts.
Hotmail seems to be particularly prone to sending emails straight to junk. If you do use hotmail, I would go so far as to say that you may be best off setting up a dedicated wedding email address with a different host. We never seem to have any problems with gmail, so that may be a good shout.
Many small businesses take a lot of time and effort to respond to enquiries so we’d hate for anyone to think that they were being ignored. That’s not what you want when you have invested a lot of time researching and contacting a supplier.
For us, we tend to respond to emails within 24 hours, but anything up to 72 hours is considered normal. This is excluding weekends, when many wedding suppliers are on location working and away from the computer.
So if you’re wedding planning at the moment- enjoy it and good luck!
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