11 High Value Revenue Stream Ideas For Wedding Planners
There is no reason why your wedding planning business can’t be making you more money. There is no world in which you’ve maxed out your potential income. The trick to this is choosing which of these revenue stream ideas for wedding planners works best for the brand and business you’ve built.
Adding an additional revenue stream for your wedding business is a great way to scale up, but it needs to be an addition to your business that feels authentic. New revenue streams work great when they either serve your current audiences or they introduce an adjacent audience to your business. Hopefully, one or more of these ways of making more money as a wedding planner speaks to you.
Why Adding Revenue Streams To Your Wedding Business Makes It Sustainable
1. Moves you beyond time-based services.
Wedding planning relies on your time. You book out for certain days, each wedding requires a number of hours to plan, so adding a revenue stream that makes money beyond your time-based services is a great option.
2. Makes your business more impervious to economic and social changes.
After going through the pandemic, we have all seen the importance of diversifying a business. Adding revenue streams can help your business weather fluctuations in the economy or strange hiccups like election years and trend changes.
3. Allows you to make more money off of current clients.
Wedding planning is a deeply personal business, and every great planner I’ve worked with genuinely loves their clients. You build trust and personal relationships with them, which means that they will trust you when you have other ways of serving them in the future.
Additional Revenue Stream Ideas for Wedding Planners
1. Design Consultation
If you offer full planning and design services for weddings, this is a great additional offering. Your experience and portfolio are why clients want to book you, so this service can allow you to work with clients who can’t afford your full planning or who live outside of your region.
Develop a design consultation service with clear deliverables and advantages for couples. The great thing about this service is that you can personalize it to fit your strengths and your time. You could offer a virtual consultation and a style guide or offer more hands-on services like floral, rental, and menu selection.
2. Destination Wedding Planning
I’m seeing a lot of my higher-end wedding planning clients include this in their services, and it’s completely genius. Many international resorts offer wedding packages that until recently have been sold and booked almost exclusively by travel agents. The travel agent books the couple’s destination wedding, and the resort handles all of the coordination.
But, as a wedding planner you can get around the travel agency requirement and connect directly with the hotel. Then, you can offer their location as a destination wedding planner, and be able to serve couples with actual wedding planning expertise during their planning process. And, for an additional fee, you can be on site in a beautiful location. Definitely a win.
3. Wedding Decor EBook
If you’re a wedding planner who is up to date on trends, consider selling digital wedding style guides on your website. You can create multiple guides for trending wedding styles so that you speak directly to multiple aesthetics.
This seems to work best for planners who offer partial or coordination services, and can use these guides as an upsell when clients initially book them. They’re part planner, party style guide.
4. Wedding Budget & Planner Printables
If you work with a lot of DIY brides for their wedding coordination, consider creating a small library of wedding printables. You can create anything from vendor guides, planning workbooks, and budget spreadsheets.
Offer these to your clients at the initial booking for a discounted rate. And, advertise them to all couples through your socials and Pinterest. It’s relatively passive income.
5. Resource Web Page
Whatever your client demographics, your wedding website needs a resource web page. A resource page allows you to share your lead magnets, affiliate links, and vendors who offer a kickback in an engaging way with your audience.
You can read this blog where I go in depth about how to make a Resource page, what should be on it, and how you can make money with it!
6. Honeymoon Travel Planning
Having developed a relationship with you over the course of the planning process, your couples will trust you with other large purchases. Help them round out their wedding experience by offering honeymoon travel planning and booking services.
You can very easily become a travel agent if you’d like to keep everything in house, or if your time is more important, you can white label (aka outsource) the actual travel booking services to a travel agent. When it comes time for your client’s to depart, you’ll make sure they have that agent’s number as their “travel concierge.”
7. Monetize Your Website’s Blog
For my wedding planning clients who’ve been around for a while and spent time and effort on growing their business’ blog, this is an easy way to add an additional revenue stream.
You can join an ad network (who will introduce ads to your blog) so long as you’re reaching at least 10,000 visits a month. The payouts range based on the ad network, but if this is something that’s already in your workflow, it’s an easy way to make more money.
8. Grow Your Team
Sometimes the traditional methods of scaling up are best. By growing your team, you can cover more weddings (especially for popular dates) than you can by yourself.
Most wedding planning businesses test drive this with one additional planner who only takes the lowest level of service offered – usually month of coordination. After proving their industry and client-facing skills, they move up to offer more expensive services.
9. Newlywed Lifestyle Services
This is something new that a few intrepid planners have starting talking about. Wedding planners are often the first time couples have worked with a professional on a one-on-one basis. And if you’re doing it right, they love and trust you, your taste, and your judgment. Theoretically, this means that they may trust you to help steer them to other excellent service providers that newlyweds often need.
Developing a newlywed lifestyle service that helps connect your couples with service professionals like realtors, interior designers, and others that they’ll use in the next five years, could be a lucrative and trail-blazing offer. It’s an idea that may start getting traction if a few planners can figure out just how to make it work.
10. New Planner Workshops & Speaking
The wedding planning industry shows no signs of slowing down, even though it’s changed dramatically in the last few years. If you have decades of experience in the industry or are particularly interested in educating other vendors, consider workshops and speaking engagements.
What you’ll need to be successful in this area is having a niche that you excel in. That can be training new planners, helping people work better with clients, or helping your peers learn something that you’ve excelled at.
11. Holiday Decorating Services
Holiday decorating is a growing opportunity for those with a great design eye. Wedding planners who feel comfortable with interior decorating can start marketing this service under their current brand or start a sister company.
This is another service that you’ll be able to offer (or at least share about) to previous clients. It’s also a service that operates during one of the slower seasons for wedding planners, making it a great way to fill in the gap.
How To Implement A New Revenue Stream
What’s the point of doing all the work to offer a new revenue stream if no one books it? Don’t do all that work for nothing. Make a clear marketing plan for your new services.
1. Reconfigure your website to include and highlight new offerings.
If your revenue streams change, your website absolutely needs to as well. Hire a professional to create an additional page for this new service (or set up a shop if needed), find purposeful places to mention and introduce that revenue stream across your website, and resubmit your sitemap to Google so that your new offering starts getting traffic.
2. Make a launch plan.
Please make a launch plan! Figure out how you want to tease this new revenue stream out so that when you open it up for bookings, you start getting leads immediately. Know which audiences you’re going to market to immediately and how you’ll do that. And make a plan for how you’ll continue to integrate this service or offering within your regular marketing plan.
3. Make in-person deals with current clients.
A soft launch/beta test/proof of concept stage is never a bad idea. Before teasing or launching your new revenue stream, test it out with some current clients. Offer your new service in person with current clients; offering a discount is a great way to encourage them to try something untested. This will help you pinpoint any potential issues and perfect your processes. Plus, you can collect reviews from them to help market this new offering.
As a former wedding planner, I have a vested interest in seeing my fellow planners make bank. I know the work and passion and emotional care it takes to be a wedding planner, and I want your finances to rise up and support you. You deserve your wedding planning business to take care of you, and these revenue stream ideas for wedding planners can help.
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Having been a visual artist for over 10 years, I know that every part of a brand (even the parts that are often unseen) deserve to be expressed with honesty and beauty. I am happiest standing behind the scenes, creating every design and detail for focused and intentional business owners. I created EP Design to stand beside visionaries and thought leaders who are fueled by joy.
