Wedding bells dropped at you by buyer expertise automation

According to The Knot, 96% of couples planning to marry in 2020 have changed their original plans to accommodate evolving COVID conditions and to keep an eye on the health and safety of guests. Because of this, 88% of couples who decided to have a ceremony and reception in 2020 had to adjust their celebrations after almost everything was almost ready and should take place. (BusinessWire)

For an ActiveCampaign employee, their wedding has been postponed four times.

The difficulty of the wedding planning process is a well known phenomenon. It has been cited as one of the most stressful, expensive, and time-consuming tasks that most people face in their life. It’s almost like comparing it to growing a business from the ground up. While these two things are of course very different from each other, they have one thing in common: You can be successful with ActiveCampaign.

Yes, I said it, you can use ActiveCampaign to offer amazing customer experiences and plan a wedding for your loved one. And that is exactly what Franco Aguirre did. Franco is Operations Manager here at ActiveCampaign, and when he started in October 2020 he was in the middle of wedding planning. He actually used a spreadsheet to keep track of everything, and it wasn’t until he joined the ActiveCampaign team that he saw that there might be a better way to plan a wedding and it wasn’t what he expected.

“I came to AC shortly before our original wedding date and we initially organized everything in a Google Sheet with around 50 tabs. But when I came to AC, I realized that we can make everything easier. ”- Franco Aguirre, Operations Manager

How can a CRM help with wedding planning?

Franco’s goals and the use of ActiveCampaign were strikingly similar to those we see when we talk to new customers about their recipe for success.

• Goal 1: Gather a reasonable amount of data like RSVP responses, diet preferences, hotel location, attendance with a date or alone, etc.
• Goal 2: Segment guests based on this data;
• Goal 3: Join the growing guest list (which included over 100 local guests) and provide frequent and relevant updates such as transportation assistance, ceremony details, and venue guidelines.

So where did he start? At first he kept it simple and as the planning went on, he added more features and channels to his strategy. Franco set up the ActiveCampaign CRM as an organizational hub where the most important details and steps for the wedding planning process would live. He had about eight different pipelines that all spoke to each other and organized the participants into buckets based on their activity – who attended for welcome drinks or post-wedding brunch, what did the guests choose as a main course, and more.

Next he added Automation workflows and email campaigns to interact with guests, depending on the data in the pipelines. Instead of sending multiple blanket emails to all guests, he customized the emails and messages using templates so that guests received personalized and relevant information and he didn’t spend too long with each message.

Tags and the mobile app are there to save the day

Staying organized through the months it takes to plan a wedding is a feat in itself. So to make sure that nothing fell through the cracks, Franco used tags and the mobile ActiveCampaign app. For the last 2 weeks before the wedding, Franco canceled about 1 guest every day which was definitely a logistical challenge as you usually have everything done with the venue and caterers before that window kicks in.

Every day they rearranged the seat assignments, checked the food choices, looked for ways to hit the minimum with the venue (a huge challenge due to COVID), and sent updated rosters to the wedding coordinator. Have all information in tags helped Franco view individual contact information from his phone and make instant decisions on the fly.

“The only thing we definitely underestimated was how much had to be done in the last few days before the wedding… The whole idea of ​​letting your automations do its thing really won me over here. It was a HUGE burden off our shoulders when everything went by itself. Without AC I would definitely have had more gray hair on my wedding pictures. “

As they neared the deadline and had the final visitor numbers well under control, they began to amuse themselves with tags to add an even more personal touch. The bachelorette party participants, friends of bachelor and business schools, and families all received different tags and sent personalized messages during the week leading up to the big day.

Personalized videos to top it off

Integrations are apparently the unsung hero when planning a party for a few hundred people, and in this case Franco used two powerful native integrations in addition to working on the ActiveCampaign platform to improve the experience for everyone involved.

First he used the Bonjoro integration to send personalized video messages to guests. Bonjoro helps companies interact with their audience at different touchpoints, and this is exactly what Franco used it for, but for wedding guests. The whole process was so easy to create and with the native connection with ActiveCampaign, he was able to seamlessly integrate the personalized messages into various campaigns and automation workflows.

“I wanted to make sure we both enjoyed the wedding and gave our guests the attention they deserve. Bonjoro helped us send personalized messages at various touchpoints throughout the week. “

Franco and his wife had seen other couples who spent a lot of time talking to guests during the reception and couldn’t quite enjoy their dinner or dance part. By using bonjoro they were able to enjoy every moment of the weekend and make sure the guests were engaged and involved. This was especially high on their list as so many had come from so far and kept up with the ever-changing date. Guests loved that extra touch and felt like they had a front row seat before the wedding.

Franco also leveraged type form Collect data about the wedding guests. The majority of the guest list had moved from outside Chicago, internationally, or in the last year. They needed a bit more flexibility and quick response times, so they turned to another powerful tool with a native connection to ActiveCampaign.

Franco created an online RSVP form and used the integration to create guests as “opportunities” in various pipelines within the CRM. Funnily enough, the Typeform actually became a minor issue as guests loved the experience so much that they filled out the form more than once. But some quick work within the CRM pipelines helped Franco remove duplicates and make sure all data was up to date.

Looking back, it’s always 20/20, and a lot of couples look back on their wedding and wish they had done a few things differently, but in the end the day was a success. For Franco, he said that one thing he would like to include in the wedding planning process is to use ActiveCampaign’s SMS functionality to send quick, timely messages as part of the automation workflow, but in the end the whole process was seamless and is fun for him and his guests.

We love all the interesting ways our platform and features are used in daily life, so we invite you to share your fun, unique and unorthodox ways that you have used ActiveCampaign! They could even be featured in your very own spotlight or customer story, so let us know!