How to sell wedding day stationery to your clients
How to sell wedding day stationery to your clients
As much as I love designing wedding invitations for my clients, my second favorite thing is designing all of their matching day-of stationery that goes with it. I love working with a client from start to finish and making their wedding brand come to life with all of their cohesive pieces to create a polished look for their wedding day.
And I will be honest, day-of items are a huge part of my financial revenue for my business.
Not only is the profit margin very good on these items, but I work with clients who truly want to invest in the details for their wedding day and want to include all sorts of amazing stationery pieces. So sometimes my day-of stationery invoices equal or exceed my invitation invoices.
But, it wasn’t always like that. When I first started my stationery business my main focus was invitations, I hadn’t really given a second thought to offering other pieces to go with it. But slowly by surely, I had more and more clients start asking “hey, do you offer x,y and z?” and of course I was desperate for any type of work back then, I said sure! And started to figure out how to go about producing some of these other items for their wedding.
And then, as I became more comfortable with some of the staple pieces (menus, programs, place cards, etc) I started asking clients after we finished their invitations if it was something they were interested in. I would get a few bites, but nothing super crazy. But as my business grew, so did my portfolio of these day-of items that I could offer, and I started getting more and more requests.I think one of the coolest items I was asked to design was custom playing cards as wedding favors!
If you don’t currently offer coordinating stationery for the wedding day, I would highly suggest that you start looking into it. I mean, you’ve already booked the client, they’re familiar with you and your style and it is an excellent opportunity to upsell your services and continue to grow your revenue. I do think that day-of items can serve as their own revenue stream if you really work on growing it!
Some of the ways that I sell these day-of items were to just start talking about them and showing them off! I made sure that the portfolios that I showed on my website included all of the matching pieces and not just the invitations. I love for my viewer to see how the full day looked and how amazing all of the stationery pieces fit into the day. People are visual, when they see how good it all looked, they’ll want that too for their day.
Another way was to streamline my process and make it easy for them to see what day-of items I offered and what the cost was. I use flat-rate pricing in my business (if you’re not sure what flat rate pricing is, check out this video here!) and since I use flat-rate pricing, I can show them pricing very easily and allow them to get an idea of what they’ll spend for their items.
I also work the “upsell” of these items into my workflow. Generally the wedding invitations are delivered and mailed 3-4 months before the wedding, so at about 2-3 months, I reach back out letting them know it’s time to start chatting about all of the coordinating pieces for their wedding day and will send them my list of packages (I use a public proposal in Dubsado) that they can pick and choose from!
I promise, the more you work on adding these day-of items to your arsenal, it will become second nature to you and your clients will love how branded and polished their wedding day looks with all of their stationery.
A few things to note about day-of items, I tend to print all of my day-of items digitally since they are generally quicker turnarounds and multiple large quantities that we usually don’t go the foil or letterpress route for due to time and price. I also love having a local printer at the ready that I can send items to print there if I don’t have time to order online and have shipped. A local printer is also great for oversized prints like seating charts and welcome signs as well!
Hi, Heather! Thanks for this post! I’d also love to read a follow-up blog about the process of designing custom day-of stationery. For instance, one of the trickiest things for me is helping a client compose a program. There’s so much that can go on it, but I don’t want to overwhelm them. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Hi, Heather! Thanks for this post! I’d also love to read a follow-up blog about the process of designing custom day-of stationery. For instance, one of the trickiest things for me is helping a client compose a program. There’s so much that can go on it, but I don’t want to overwhelm them. Any thoughts? Thanks!
You are so welcome, Megan! Glad you enjoyed it! Oh that’s a great topic, I will definitely add it to my blog list!