Someone fills out a form on your website, expressing interest in hosting their wedding with you. Do you know how much that site visit inquiry is worth? How about when you actually host a site visit? Do you know easily and quickly how much that site visit is worth based on how many convert into clients?
If not, we’ve got you covered. After answering just four questions, there are a couple of simple calculations you can perform to figure out how to put a dollar value estimate on each step in your sales funnel. From there, you can dive deeper to figure out how different marketing tactics for your wedding venue are performing, based on how qualified those leads are.
The end result is a simpler, smarter, more informed marketing plan that you can tackle, regardless of how much time you have to devote to marketing.
Step One: Answer These Four Questions
For any of these questions, feel free to answer for the trailing 12 months, the previous calendar year, or an average – whatever method you choose, just make sure you’re consistent with it for each question. Know these will be estimates and we’ll get into vetting how qualified the inquiries are once you’ve done the quick calculations.
1) How Many Site Visit Inquiries Do You Receive Each Year? Note: Make sure you consider all sources – phone calls, emails, website inquiries, referral sites like Wedding Wire, and even in-person. Remember, estimates are fine.
2) How Many Site Visits Do You Do Each Year?
3) How Many Weddings Do You Book Each Year?
4) How Much Revenue Do You Generate Per Wedding, on Average?
Step Two: Calculate the Value of a Site Visit Inquiry
Now that you’ve answered the questions, we’ll use an example to help guide you through the calculations. Let’s call the venue “Wedding Venue A.” (Creative, we know.) In 2018, Wedding Venue A:
• Received 500 site visit inquiries
• Conducted 100 site visits
• Booked 20 weddings
• Generated $10,000 per wedding, on average
Here’s the equation you’ll use:
In the case of Wedding Venue A, here’s how it breaks down:
(20 booked weddings ÷ 500 site visit inquiries) * $10,000 average revenue per wedding = The value of a site visit inquiry is $400 ((i.e., each site visit inquiry is worth an average of $400)
Step Three: Calculate the Value of a Site Visit
As you would expect, it’s a very similar equation used to find the value of a site visit:
In the case of Wedding Venue A, here’s how it breaks down:
(20 booked weddings ÷ 100 site visits) * $10,000 average revenue per wedding = The value of a site visit is $2,000 (i.e., each site visit is worth an average of $2,000)
Step Four: Qualify Sub-Segments of Your Inquiries
The figures above represent a great starting point, but you can choose to go deeper. The key to this step is knowing where your actual brides first learned of your venue – then you can perform the same calculations based on those segments.
Now that you know how to perform the calculations, you could get a deeper look into the numbers by segmenting and tracking prospects by any number of factors – like what channel attracted their interest.
For example, if you segment prospects by channel – an ad on social, a Google search, an email campaign – you could more wisely allocate your marketing spend. You may see that prospects acquired via social ads have a much higher conversion rate than those acquired via Google AdWords campaigns, for example, and decide to shift some of your ad budget around accordingly.
Now, Use the Calculations to Evaluate Your Marketing Tactics
Now that you know how to value site visit inquiries and site visits, it may shift how you view ad spends. If you spend $300 on targeted Facebook ads (and we can help here, by the way) and get in front of thousands of engaged couples, it’d take a single site visit inquiry for the campaign to return a 1.5X ROI.
Suddenly, when you start viewing the process in those terms, you realize that your website is much more than a pretty vanity presence – it’s a real business driver that should be actively capturing leads. Speaking of capturing leads: Make sure you have a form built into the weddings page of your website, rather than just an email address or phone number. This reduces the friction required for the bride or groom to make their first contact with you and can begin to help qualify them, saving both parties time.
Bonus: Don’t Miss the Hidden Takeaways in the Numbers
Finally, consider looking at the raw numbers you provided for the four questions above as the skeleton of a sales funnel. Returning to Wedding Venue A’s metrics:
• Received 500 site visit inquiries
• Conducted 100 site visits
• Booked 20 weddings
• Generated $10,000 per wedding, on average
Sure, they were able to book 20 weddings last year, but they may look at that 20% site visit conversion rate (20 weddings ÷ 100 site visits) as lackluster, and aim to improve it in the following year by rethinking how they conduct site visits and what they can do better.