4 tips to make your clients love Aisle Planner
Updated: Mar 9, 2022
Aisle Planner is easily one of the most powerful wedding planning tools on the market. Keeping everything in one place can make wedding planning much easier. There is, however, one potential roadblock to a smooth planning process within Aisle Planner: your clients.
You obviously need your clients to be involved, but we all know they can make it a pain sometimes. They may keep commenting on the wrong things in the wrong places, or accidentally (and irreversibly) delete important planning categories, and they may even refuse to use Aisle Planner altogether and just text message you every five minutes instead.
Whatever the reason, as the planner it’s up to you to guide them through the process. We’re going to help you set yourself up for success so that you can set them up for success.
Use templates
Let’s be honest - Aisle Planner is kind of intimidating at first. Even if you’re an expert at it now, didn’t you feel a little bit lost in the beginning? Now imagine it from the client side. They already don’t know anything about wedding planning, and now they have to figure out this expansive app too?
One way you can gently guide your couples in is to make use of the templates function. Opening up Aisle Planner and seeing every section blank can leave your clients confused as to what the purpose of this whole thing is. Here are a few sections you can pre-fill with templates that will make it clear why your clients need to use them:
Timeline
Layout & Seating
Contacts (put yourself in there first for an easy example!)
Budget
Notes
Style Guides
That may seem like a lot of work, but the best part about templates is how easy they are to use once they are made. You just need to create your basic set (or have us do it!) one time, and then choose which ones to use whenever you create a new project. Your clients will love the gentle guidance and examples you’ve prepared!
Have a detailed checklist
Even with templates, there’s a lot going on in Aisle Planner. Your clients may not know where to start! Rather than throwing them into the proverbial deep end, teach your clients to swim by using the Checklist feature.
The Checklist isn’t only useful for planning the wedding - you can use it as a how-to guide for using Aisle Planner itself! Making the first thing clients see part of the teaching process reduces how much hand-holding you have to do. Our “Getting Started” section has 36 tasks for both planners and clients to complete at the start of every project.
In every Aisle Planner setup we do, we implement this feature to make the beginning of each client (and planner) experience go smoothly. Plus, we have a fun automation that does it all for us rather than having us type every single step out! Check out the video below to see it in action.
Introduce Aisle Planner in a meeting
An effective way to start off on the right foot with Aisle Planner clients is to be right there with them. If you just set them loose without any guidance, any number of outcomes could happen. They might get intimidated and give up on Aisle Planner completely, or they might somehow find a way to delete all of their information.
Setting up a planning meeting where you go through the uses of Aisle Planner can make them feel more confident now and save you some headache later. In this age of Zoom meetings, it’s even easier because you can just share your screen and show everything you need to. Just make sure you know what you’re doing in Aisle Planner first, so that your clients can see that you’re an expert at it!
This is a more obvious tip, but it’s one of the most important ones. Being there to answer questions and explain the tools will make everyone’s lives easier throughout the planning process.
Keep your communication inside Aisle Planner
Wedding planners that don’t use Aisle Planner can get lost in a sea of text messages and emails. Aisle Planner can replace this confusion by keeping all of your communication in one place, organizing by project and task automatically, while also keeping your personal phone and inbox clutter-free!
If you want to create this boundary with your clients, encourage them to use Aisle Planner for all comments, updates, and questions. You can set the standard as well, by sending all of your communications through Aisle Planner.
Even if a client texts or emails you, you can still reinforce the way you want to communicate. Rather than respond directly to the text or email, find the topic that they’re asking about in Aisle Planner and leave a comment with your answer there. Your client still gets the info, plus they get a reminder that Aisle Planner is the place to go for communicating with you. We like to call this “training your clients”.
Don’t give up
Our final tip, which isn’t really a tip, is to keep at it! Even if a client is hesitant about or uninterested in using Aisle Planner, the best thing you can do is continue encouraging them. People tend to get the message when every reply you send is from Aisle Planner and all your messages include “I’ve put this in the ____ section on Aisle Planner.”
Use these tips from the start and the time leading up to your weddings should be much less stressful for you and your clients. Happy planning!
About the author
Madelyn Mahoney Madelyn came to Wedding Tech BFF because she loves helping people better their lives through technology. If there's a website, app, or platform she doesn't know already, just give her 10 minutes and she'll know how to make it work for you and your business! When she's not being a Wedding Tech BFF, she's probably begging her cat for attention or writing young-adult romance novels!
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