Wedding planning is a wonderful profession. You get the privilege of helping couples plan one of the happiest and most magical days of their lives. Ideally, the process is exciting, fun, and positive.
Nevertheless, wedding planning can also be associated with a great deal of stress. Such an important day comes along with high stakes and a lot of pressure. That means that wedding planning can be both a highly enjoyable and stressful job simultaneously.
In order to avoid that stress as much as possible, successful wedding planners use different tools and software to help them stay on top of everything.
So, in the spirit of taking the stress out of wedding planning, we’ve put together a list of our top seven tools for wedding planners. Each of these tools can help with the wedding planning process in a slightly different way, so keep reading to find out how.
1. Bonsai: Address all your documentation needs
Bonsai is a tool that can come in handy for freelancers of any kind. Nevertheless, wedding planners love it because it helps them with all their documentation needs. And if there’s anything planning a wedding involves a lot of, it’s paperwork.
We love Bonsai because it has documentation templates that can be used for all the different aspects of your wedding planning business. They’ve got everything from a free wedding planner contract template to invoice templates to quote templates.
Don’t underestimate the convenience of having documentation templates to work with as a wedding planner. It’ll save you tons of time and frustration. Here’s a full list of Bonsai’s documentation templates:
● Invoice templates
● Contract templates
● Proposal templates
● Agreement templates
● Scope of work templates
● Quote templates
● Credit note templates
● Estimate templates
If you’re ready to get started with Bonsai, they’ve got a 14-day free trial available. After that, their paid plans range between $19 and $29 USD per month.
2. Honeybook: Manage your clients in one place
Client management is another hurdle that wedding planners have to face regularly. If you rely on emails and text messages, things can get overwhelming quickly. That’s why we prefer to use a client management software like Honeybook to stay organized.
Honeybook is truly a one-and-done solution, meaning that it has a feature for every step in your wedding planning journey. A few of our favorites include:
● Professional, customizable online contracts
● Custom branded invoices complete with automatic payment reminders
● Complete work proposal files
● Simple, secure online payment processing
● Meeting and call scheduling features
We also love that Honeybook has handy automations that help cut down on general busywork, templates to help you get started, and a mobile app that makes it easy to work on-the-go.
Last but not least, you can try out Honeybook for free for 7 days. After that, their paid plans vary depending on the features you’d like to use. They range between $9 and $39 USD monthly.
3. Flodesk: Send clients beautiful emails and newsletters
Many wedding planners send out emails or newsletters to their subscribers. However, your digital communications will look more professional if they’re sleek, well-designed, and on brand. That’s why Flodesk is such a fantastic platform for any wedding planner to use to design their emails.
Flodesk is a step above many other email marketing platforms out there due to their modern, elegant templates and easy-to-use interface. Some of their features we love include:
● Beautiful, ready-to-use email templates
● A landing page and form builder
● Tons of ready-to-use integrations like Shopify, Slack, and Instagram
● Powerful email marketing automations and workflows
Flodesk’s pricing is very straightforward because it’s consistent no matter how many subscribers you have. You can try it out for free with their 30-day trial. After that, their only paid plan is $38 USD per month or $418 annually (you get one month free).
4. Planoly: Stay on top of your social media presence
Nowadays, social media is huge in the wedding industry. Top wedding planners, photographers, make up artists, vendors, and more have robust social media presences on pages like Instagram and post regularly. In order to stay in touch with your audience, get new customers, brand yourself, and show off your best work, it’s essential to have some great social media pages associated with your name.
Many wedding planners simply don’t have the time to post on social media regularly. They find that it takes up too much time and can’t fit it into their day. This doesn’t have to be the case if you use a tool like Planoly, however. Planoly is specifically designed to help simplify and streamline posting on social media.
Alongside tools to help users plan and schedule content for their social media pages, Planoly has some additional helpful features for wedding planners:
● StoriesEdit: Allows users to create and customize content for their social channels. Save most-used templates, design in draft mode, and keep working on-to-go with their mobile app.
● IG Planner: A visual planning tool for both your Instagram grid and your stories. You can plan your social media posts out for weeks in advance without ever leaving the app.
● Pin Planner: If you’re into Pinterest, you’ll love this feature. It allows you to manage your Pinterest content and give it better visibility.
Planoly has a free plan that you can use for as long as you want. If you want to take a deeper dive into their features and the number of uploads you can make per month, you’ll want to invest in one of their paid plans. They range between $7 and $23 USD per month.
5. Pinterest: Get inspired with visuals
By this point, Pinterest is a classic wedding planning tool. Its highly visual platform helps wedding planners and couples alike get inspired when they’re organizing the big day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working on a beach wedding, a forest wedding, or a traditional religious ceremony, a browse on Pinterest will surely leave you feeling inspired.
Pinterest is especially great for wedding planning because of its collaborative nature. It’s easy to share Pinterest boards with other people so you can brainstorm and gather ideas together.
Some of our favorite wedding-related things to search on Pinterest include:
● Dresses and suits
● Decorations
● Hairstyles
● Bridal party styling
● Seating arrangements
● Floral arrangements
● Color schemes
● Wedding cakes and desserts
One of the best things about Pinterest is that it’s free. You don’t have to pay anything to get your creative juices flowing!
6. Typeform: Put together fun surveys for all your wedding needs
Typeform is an excellent platform where you can make all kinds of interactive surveys and forms. They aim to make collecting information an enjoyable experience that’s akin to a real-life conversation.
Although this might not seem like your typical wedding planning tool, it’s becoming increasingly popular. There are many different ways to use Typeform while planning a wedding including everything from sending out save-the-dates and invitations to gathering information from new clients.
Typeform even has several wedding-specific templates, so you can use those to save time during your planning process. Some examples include:
● Wedding planning consultant form template
● Wedding inquiry form template
● Wedding reservation form template
● Online wedding invitation template
● Wedding photography quote form template
If you want to try out Typeform for your wedding planning needs, you can start with their free plan. Once you’re ready to take things up a notch, their paid plans range between $29 USD and $99 USD per month.
7. Allseated: Visualize event design and floor plans
Last of all, Allseated is a basic but handy wedding planning tool. It’s an easy-to-use platform that was designed specifically to plan large-scale events.
Allseated is especially useful because users can view 3D previews of their event floor plans. Everything is customizable and shown true-to-scale, so wedding planners and couples alike can truly visualize their event before it happens. This comes in especially handy if you’re planning an event remotely or in a far-away location.
Allseated has a section of their platform that’s dedicated to weddings. There, users can manage their guest lists, adjust and preview their floor plans, and work on their seating charts.
If you want to use Allseated to make your floor plan development process a little more straightforward, click here. You can get started for free!
Streamline your wedding planning processes
There you have it! As a wedding planner, we know how much of a challenge it can be to stay on top of all your tasks and responsibilities. We hope that the list of tools we’ve curated makes your day-to-day wedding planning processes easier.
Whether you choose to focus on your documents and contracts, general client management, email marketing, social media platforms, visual inspiration boards, forms and surveys or floor plans, we’ve included a tool for you in this breakdown.
We’re sure that you’ll use them to improve your professional reputation, stay on top of your daily tasks, and ultimately plan your most successful weddings ever.
Written by Sydney Triggs
Sydney Triggs is a [content] writer, editor & educator from Vancouver, Canada currently settled in Barcelona, Spain. She’s written hundreds of articles about marketing, travel & leisure, fashion, sustainability, technology, finance & investment, remote work and human resources, as well as more personal fiction and thought pieces.
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