Weddingsonline.ie enquiries for suppliers

Peterdalkey

Jonathan

Very balanced post, you make your points very well. You certainly have fantastic traffic volumes to your site, your marketing and promotion is superb. The only concern I would have is that I see no positive responses on here from the supply side in terms of business generated. Rather they seem to feel that the site gives a great service to the happy couples rather than to those who pay for it, the advertisers/ service providers. If it were me, I would be worried about the happiness of the guys who give me the dough!

jgb

Peter,

Believe me, that we are extremley interested in the service providers, we go to great lengths to help / consult / advise / give sales training etc.

You have made a good point and we do need to continue to improve, but if I do not know who the anonymous client is, I cannot help them.

What I would suggest would be that they contact me directly and I would be glad to help, I have seen peoples businesses turn around completely when they understand the potential of Weddingsonline.ie and use it to its full potential.

Cheers,

Jonathan

skb57894

well said Peter! Its a waste of money for the majority and a failed business model!

Graham

skb57894 wrote: »

Its a waste of money for the majority and a failed business model!

I don't know that I'd go as far as saying it's a failed business model. It's true that the general web directories have died a death but that's because they bought nothing new to the table and just didn't have the scale to offering anything useful (anyone remember Doras).

Specialised portals that have managed to bring together special interest groups and introduce social elements like discussion forums, user ratings/feedback etc can still do well.

Sligogirl51

jgb wrote: »

Folks,

I read the thread with a huge amount of curiosity because I am the sales manager it is always interesting to see how you are perceived in the market place.

There are a few issues that I would like to address, hopefully this will shed some light on what we do & remove these misconceptions.

Email Enquiries through Sophies Service / Finder - The Service Findersare usually sent during office hours, this is because they are checked before hand to ensure that there is no spam and sometimes we need to go back to the couples to ask for a little more info.
We encourage people to send enquiries to our client suppliers, these are usually couples in the info gathering stage, planning their wedding & not always at the point where they are ready to book. I would always encourage clients to treat these enquiries very differently to direct enquiries, we are happy to look over your communications and provide advice to help you secure more business.

We have actaully held a couple of free seminars to help clients convert more business, if you have been unable to attend I would suggest that you contact your account manager on 01 883 9270 and they would pleased to help you. Our next seminar is on the 10th Feb at Clontarf Castle Hotel.

Making up enquiries - We wouldnt be the market leader and have 14 years online marketing experience for weddings in Ireland if we went down that route, our business model is all about a return on investment and it works very well.

Google Analytics, you will see traffic on Google Analytics, but you must look in the campaign section as we add an appended code that tracks clearly the clicks. We can also forward you a a comprehensive report on your campaign to date, if that would be useful?
Be careful with Google Analytics, because whilst it is an excellent tool it is not 100% accurate, if you Google "How Reliable is Google Analytics" you will find out some useful info.

With regards to lots of suppliers, there are indeed a lot of suppliers but also we have a huge amount of people using the site, over 200K uniques per month and over 1000 couples registering with us every month, bear in mind this is in a market place of approx 20,000 weddings per year. We have a database of over 40,000 couples that have opted into our email marketing. The trick is to differentiate yourself & try to improve conversions by taking the advice freely available. You could be the best photographer, but are you the best sales person? how do you bridge the gap? There is plenty of business to go around - 20,000 weddings per year in Ireland - 100 photographers promoted on Weddingsonline.

Thanks for your comments, please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

Jonathan Bryans 01 883 9270

Jonathan,

To get our advertising business, your sales team promised far more than you deliver.
Your site has not delivered the volume of enquiries promised, and that is a fact. We have not received 20 leads per month that your salesperson said we would get.

We get the odd email.. I.e. A general enquiry sent to a number of suppliers, rarely with a contact phone number, normally with a free email address as the originator.

In 3 months we haven't had one qualified lead, or made one sale as a result of our 600euro + advertising spend with you..

I have already emailed your sales people to say your advertising isn't working, and we won't renew.. I got no reply to that!

Weddings Online does not work for this, successful, skilful, reasonably priced and personable photographer, with a fantastic portfolio.. so don't blame your paying clients for being poor salespeople.

I hope that clarifies things for you.

Regards

mariokonde

they(WOL) will delete your posts, as they deleted all my ones. because I stated all true statements and proofs of no clients in 6months! ZERO. I sick with them, I dont know a single friend who stayed with them for a second year. stay away from WOL

Sligogirl51

I wish I had found this thread before I paid for advertising.

Boards.ie: Niamh

I removed the thread while checking a few posts, in case anyone is wondering where it disappeared to.

jgb wrote: »

Folks,

I read the thread with a huge amount of curiosity because I am the sales manager at www.weddingsonline.ie, it is always interesting to see how you are perceived in the market place.

There are a few issues that I would like to address, hopefully this will shed some light on what we do & remove these misconceptions.

Email Enquiries through Sophies Service / Finder - The Service Findersare usually sent during office hours, this is because they are checked before hand to ensure that there is no spam and sometimes we need to go back to the couples to ask for a little more info.
We encourage people to send enquiries to our client suppliers, these are usually couples in the info gathering stage, planning their wedding & not always at the point where they are ready to book. I would always encourage clients to treat these enquiries very differently to direct enquiries, we are happy to look over your communications and provide advice to help you secure more business.

We have actaully held a couple of free seminars to help clients convert more business, if you have been unable to attend I would suggest that you contact your account manager on 01 883 9270 and they would pleased to help you. Our next seminar is on the 10th Feb at Clontarf Castle Hotel.

Making up enquiries - We wouldnt be the market leader and have 14 years online marketing experience for weddings in Ireland if we went down that route, our business model is all about a return on investment and it works very well.

Google Analytics, you will see traffic on Google Analytics, but you must look in the campaign section as we add an appended code that tracks clearly the clicks. We can also forward you a a comprehensive report on your campaign to date, if that would be useful?
Be careful with Google Analytics, because whilst it is an excellent tool it is not 100% accurate, if you Google "How Reliable is Google Analytics" you will find out some useful info.

With regards to lots of suppliers, there are indeed a lot of suppliers but also we have a huge amount of people using the site, over 200K uniques per month and over 1000 couples registering with us every month, bear in mind this is in a market place of approx 20,000 weddings per year. We have a database of over 40,000 couples that have opted into our email marketing. The trick is to differentiate yourself & try to improve conversions by taking the advice freely available. You could be the best photographer, but are you the best sales person? how do you bridge the gap? There is plenty of business to go around - 20,000 weddings per year in Ireland - 100 photographers promoted on Weddingsonline.

Thanks for your comments, please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

Jonathan Bryans 01 883 9270

Thanks for your post Jonathan. We give any business being discussed on the site the right to reply, however for any other posts can you please contact us on hello@boards.ie first so that we can verify that you are in fact from weddingsonline.ie? Thank you:)

mariokonde wrote: »

they(WOL) will delete your posts, as they deleted all my ones. because I stated all true statements and proofs of no clients in 6months! ZERO. I sick with them, I dont know a single friend who stayed with them for a second year. stay away from WOL

I'm not sure how you think your posts on Boards.ie were moderated by anyone at weddingsonline - they were not. Any posts moderated on Boards are done by our site Moderators or Admins, that is all.

Gloomtastic!

Boards.ie: Niamh wrote: »

I'm not sure how you think your posts on Boards.ie were moderated by anyone at weddingsonline - they were not. Any posts moderated on Boards are done by our site Moderators or Admins, that is all.

I think they were referring to postings on WOL....

Sligogirl51

Peterdalkey wrote: »

every photographer I clicked on at weedingsonline had a direct email hyperlink to send an email directly from me to them. Unless they are just spamming out the details of all wedding people who register on the site?

I think that may be the case, as the "enquiries" are vague, and often without sufficient detail or phone number. They seem to employ a "throw enough mud at the wall and some might stick"- approach to it, and I think most suppliers get the same "leads"?