9 Apps I Love For Running My Wedding Business
There are definitely tons of tools and apps on the market for wedding pros and wedding planners. If you’ve been in business for a bit, I’m sure you’re already getting emails and Instagram ads regularly touting different planning software and CRM tools. Or maybe you’ve noticed your peers sharing different referral codes and discounts.
Don’t be fooled by slick sales pitches and high referral fees.
I always suggest that wedding planners and pros do their research, and figure out which tools are right for you and your business, not which promo code sounds best. That said, this post does have affiliate links and promo codes for products I love to use and wholeheartedly recommend.
For wedding planners specifically, there are different software options available to manage wedding planning for your clients, but I honestly don’t think they’re necessary unless you’re completely at a loss to set up your own systems. I’ve done the free trials and never been impressed. There seem to be holes in the system and I’ve been able to manage things better with my own methods, which often turn out to be less expensive. I’ll touch on this more later.
Here are nine tools I love to use for my wedding planning business:
HELLOSIGN - CONTRACT SIGNING
Previously I used HelloSign for all of my client contracts. This easy online signature app saves me and my clients so much time. Win-win! I love that it’s so much simpler than my old method. You’ve been there — drafting a new contract every time, converting to a PDF and sending by email, then waiting for clients to print, sign, scan, and send back. It takes forever. You want the fastest possible option for clients to sign and commit.
This online signing app makes it easy for my wedding business clients, and wedding show exhibitors to sign contracts online or even complete forms. HelloSign’s free version will cover 3 contracts each month, and I still use that occasionally to complete forms. Perfect fit if you’re just starting out and don’t have a ton of new clients just yet.
With HelloSign’s paid version, about $15 a month, I could have several contract templates uploaded and ready to go. It helped a lot for productivity when I was running the wedding show and sent dozens of contracts each month in addition to the ones for my wedding planning clients.
DUBSADO - CRM
I blogged previously right here about why I chose Dubsado over Honeybook. I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to add a CRM software to my wedding planning business. Once I added Dubsado, the paid account for HelloSign was no longer necessary, as contracts and online signing are built in with Dubsado.
After two disappointing free trials of Aisle Planner, I realized I didn’t need a wedding planning software, just a CRM to automate my systems for client onboarding, proposals, contracts, payments and more. After months of research and consideration, I decided that Dubsado was the best fit for me. I love that I can customize and white-label it to match the KJ & Co. branding. And later on I can easily add additional brands to separate different revenue streams.
Dubsado’s free trial is based on three projects, not a 30-day expiration. Very generous!
Get 20% off your first month or first year, with my link right here. Don’t forget to use my Dubsado Promo Code “KJANDCO” for your 20% discount.
If you’re on the fence about which CRM software is the right fit for your wedding or creative business, I highly recommend that you book a Dubsado demo and take a closer look.
CANVA - GRAPHIC DESIGN
You can start with a free account, but hands down, my Canva subscription is one of the best investments I ever made for my business. You can read more about how much I love it right here. But the gist of it is, this graphic design app was a total game changer. I absolutely love it because I can make graphics and documents that are clean, consistent, and on-brand all by myself!
I use Canva almost every day to make social media and blog images, pins, PDFs and more. This is at a fraction of the cost of having to outsource. Not only do I save money, because I don’t need my graphic designer for every little file, but I save time because I’m not waiting for someone else to do the work. I save even more time using templates. I’m totally obsessed. There’s a template for everything! Don’t ever waste time starting from scratch.
If the thought of learning a graphic design software sounds intimidating, don’t worry. It’s pretty much drag and drop and not scary at all. If you want to see exactly how I use it for my wedding business, I’m offering two recordings of my Canva webinars for the price of one.
If I’ve got a project on the go — personal or professional — you can bet I have a Pinterestboard for it. Nowadays my Pinterest is geared to wedding business coaching clients, but from a wedding pro perspective, it’s a very important part of your marketing strategy. Not to mention, it’s free to join. (You can pay to promote pins ad boost their reach, but I don’t think that’s necessary.)
Pinterest provides a ton of free traffic to my website. As a matter of fact, 95% of my web traffic from social media comes from Pinterest. That was a pretty sobering fact when I consider how much effort I’ve been funneling in to Instagram.
Pinterest is an important part of serving existing wedding clients as well. I like to gather inspiration here regularly, and create an inspiration board for each of my wedding planning clients ahead of writing their design proposal. Pinterest is super helpful when I’m putting together mood boards as well. I often use it to reference design details regularly in vendor meetings.
Follow me on Pinterest for tons of helpful wedding business tips, eye candy and more.
Learn more about Pinterest marketing strategy.
TAILWIND - PINTEREST MARKETING
Pinning is an important part of my marketing strategy both as a wedding planner and a business coach. I’ve found automating pinning is the best option for me, to save time and be strategic. So I use Tailwindto schedule my pins.
It’s so much simpler to batch pins and divvy content out to the right boards on a schedule, rather than haphazardly when I used to make time for it randomly. With Tailwind’s built in settings, I’m less likely to get caught up in Pinterest’s spam filters.
Get a free one month trial with my link right here.
FLODESK - EMAIL MARKETING
You’re probably sick of hearing it but an email list is an important marketing tool because you own your list, unlike your Instagram and Facebook followers. If those apps disappeared tomorrow, so would your connections. But if you’re managing your own email list, that audience is all yours. Not to mention, much more primed for business, and more likely to convert to a booking or sale than social media prospects. Email marketing absolutely has better conversion rates, and much higher engagement rates.
Previously I managed my email list with MailChimp but it was totally boring. Nowadays I use Flodesk and I absolutely love it because you can’t beat their templates and the ability to customize the look and feel to match your branding. I get compliments on the look of my newsletter nearly every time I send one out.
It’s not for everyone, but it’s worth dipping your toe, when you’re ready. Don’t feel like you have to commit to a daily or weekly email like all those online retailer newsletters you’re getting. But could you commit to once a quarter? Everyone can come up with four topics a year, right?
FLODESK promo CODE
Get 50% off your Flodesk subscription with my affiliate link.
ALLSEATED - WEDDING FLOOR PLANS
Speaking of lists, if you’re on mine you’ve probably heard all about my ordeal to find a floor planning software. Long story short, I nearly spent thousands of my hard-earned dollars on a pricy software, even after what I felt like were some pretty #boss negotiations. At the last second, I panicked at the expense and decided to look harder for a less expensive option.
Enter Allseated. I’ve used the free plan for years now — which covers up to 10 events per year. It’s the best option I’ve found for creating wedding floor plans. It even has a 3D feature and social distancing tools.
I love that there are so many venue floor plans already built in, or I can pay a small fee to have a new wedding venue floor plan uploaded to the software to work more accurately. It makes it so much simpler to work out different design plans for my wedding planning client’s design proposals. This is so helpful for my clients to visualize their space, when design is not in their skillset.
Another huge bonus of Allseated is their free industry webinars from big names.
GOOGLE DRIVE - MANAGING PLANNING FILES
Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve tried out several wedding planning software options. Even after two free trials of Aisle Planner, I was totally underwhelmed. It wasn’t worth it for me to spend hundreds of dollars each year on planning software that fell short. While it does offer a ton of tools and features all in one place, I found that many of those functions worked better in other apps I was already using, like the ones I listed above. And planner specific functions, like even a guest list, seemed to be missing very basic details. In addition, the feedback from my clients was that they didn’t want yet another app to deal with.
I had already created most of these functions pretty successfully with Google Drive, using folders, docs and sheets to manage vendor quotes and contracts, planning timelines, guest lists, budgets and more. This has worked for me for years now, without complaint from my wedding planning clients, even as their budgets increased over the years.
I highly recommend you consider building your own systems in Google Drive, you can create your own planning docs easily or work with templates. My super helpful guest list spreadsheet template is available right here as a part of our TRS stationery course.
I’ll blog soon about how I use Google Drive specifically.
LATER - SCHEDULING INSTAGRAM
Making sure that my Instagram feed is beautiful is as important as posting consistently. So in order to plan ahead and stick to a schedule, I use Later. In particular, I love that it allows me to preview my upcoming feed and squares and shuffle things around. This way I can ensure that my future feed has a good mix of content, and that I’m spacing out different subject matter and including pictures of myself.
I use Later on my laptop about 75% of the time, to work on Instagram content in batches. I find this works best because all of my portfolio and headshot or branding photos are saved right on my computer, rather than filling up my phone storage. Plus I can make Canva graphics as needed.
Then I use the app on my phone the rest of the time, to continue to work on post captions and post anything that won’t go through automatically like carousel posts.
I also love using the whole screen on my extra monitor for the calendar function to make sure I’ve spaced out posts on consistent basis. Being able to see content for an entire month at a time is awesome!
When it comes to Instagram, pick a schedule you can actually adhere to! Don’t feel obligated to post every day if coming up with content is a struggle.