- Hire Your Wedding Vendors Wisely. When you are interviewing your wedding vendors, pay attention to their communication style. Is their written and oral correspondence clear? Do you feel as if they are listening to you? You will communicate with your wedding vendors quite a bit, so having a similar communication style is vital to your successful wedding planning.
- Don’t Assume Anything. Your wedding vendors are just getting to know you, so they are learning your communication style too. Be clear and thorough when you communicate. Don’t assume your vendors know what you are thinking.
- Set Up a Communication System. Create an e-mail account for wedding planning only. You are going to get a lot of e-mail messages during your wedding planning, and you don’t want your special message from your Aunt Hilda to get lost in your wedding e-mails.
- Set up project-specific folders within your e-mail account. File the e-mail messages (from both your in-box and out-box) within the corresponding folder so that you can easily find them when needed.
- Follow-Up to Your Phone Calls with an E-Mail Message. To ensure you and your wedding vendors are on the same page, send a quick e-mail message after your call to re-cap your conversation. It doesn’t have to be a long, drawn out message, but you want to be sure that you are in agreement before too much time passes.
- Make Your E-Mails Count. Instead of sending numerous daily e-mails to a wedding vendor, jot down all of your questions from the day. Then put your questions together in one email rather than sending six different emails addressing the same concern. Now, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share as much information as possible! Your wedding vendors just want to be sure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle of e-mails.
- Ask questions. You get married (for the first time) once – your wedding vendors manage weddings all of the time. Don’t worry if your question seems silly to you because it probably won’t seem silly to your vendors. There really is no such thing as a stupid question.
- Be Visual/Share pictures. The wedding industry is a creative business, so your vendors are most likely visual people. Rather than trying to explain your wedding flowers, find a similar picture in a magazine or on the web and share that with your floral designer instead.
- Save your difficult topics for face-to-face conversations. E-mails can be easily misunderstood, which makes any conversation difficult. If you need to address a difficult topic, ask for a face-to-face conversation. If that is not an option, then use the telephone.
Now, all of your wedding vendors should be communicating with you in the same manner. But this is your money – and it is important for you to stay of top of your correspondence with all of your wedding vendors.
Love & Soul Always, Kawania