My Solutions to No More Bad Wedding Toasts

In my last blog post, I discussed in great detail how I set up wedding speeches for success. This doesn’t eliminate every bad wedding speech, but it will absolutely provide the wedding clients you work with better speeches overall. Be sure to read entirely through the prior blog post on this topic before continuing to read this one.

With this post, I will share the specifics of the emails I send out to people confirmed to be speaking and I will share what my “Speaking at Weddings” tip sheet looks like.

EMAILS

I have uniquely written emails for all of the following speech types: Toast to the Bride, Toast to the Groom, Toast to the Couple, Welcoming Bride to the Family, Welcoming Groom to the Family. If a different speech type than listed here is being presented at the wedding, I simply modify one of my email templates for that one time purpose.

I send all of these emails through DJ Event Planner which, as you’ll see when you open up one of the email templates, allows me to utilize merge tags to create a highly customized looking email with very little effort. Often times, I don’t have to change any wording for the email’s intended recipient. I simply enter the email address in the “To” dialogue box, the merge tags auto complete their magic entering the couples name in all of the appropriate places and I get to click send. That’s truly all there is to it.

For a sample of my “Toast to the Bride” email, click here.
For a sample of my “Welcoming Bride to the Family” email, click here.

TIP SHEET

Rather than attaching the documents these email’s reference, I simply embed links to those documents via Dropbox. As I’ve spoken and written about before, Dropbox is not only a valuable resource for managing music libraries between multiple computers, it also serves small little purposes like this one. Much like the two email template links I shared above this paragraph, I also share documents like my “Speaking at Weddings” tip sheet in the same fashion.

The tip sheet I share is constantly evolving and changing. It is simply a collection of basic tips to anyone speaking at weddings. It also allows me to share photographs of what “speaking at weddings” looks like when not using a podium (I strongly dislike any podiums being used at weddings; thank you, Bill Hermann, of the Entertainment Experience, for your perspective on this long ago).

For a sample of what my “Speaking at Weddings” tip sheet looks like, click here.

You might ask yourself why I’ve shared some of my speaking advice within the body of the email itself and then left all of the other tips for presentation in the tip sheet document. My thoughts on this have to do with what information, of everything I am sharing with them, is truly most important. If the intended recipient doesn’t actually open the attached documents, what is the most valuable advice I can give them? To me, it is the content of the speech. (this is most obvious in the “welcome” email template as I find they more often need assistance with content) I want them to write a GOOD speech, if at all possible. That’s why I mention very specific “content” details in the body of the email and leave most “technical” items in the tip sheet. I also like breaking up the information in two mediums (the email and the tip sheet document) so that it’s not as overwhelming as being presented all together.

In his 1% Solution group on Facebook, Randy Bartlett recently shared what his speaking tips document looks like, so I imagine I’ll be giving mine a refresh over the coming months. This will at least get you started on creating your own materials though and I hope it serves to help you produce better and better events for the wedding couples you work with.

Now’s your chance to tell me what I’m missing in my tip sheet. Have you got a suggestion for me? If so, I’d love to hear it!

Thanks for reading… now get to work on doing your best to influence no more bad wedding toasts!

Leave a comment below or contact me here.

~ Dave

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5 thoughts on “My Solutions to No More Bad Wedding Toasts”

  1. Great Post Dave! I always enjoy your content. Is it possible to take the email addresses that are given to you (in the planning form) and insert them so these emails could be automated in DJEP? Or do you email these using another program other than DJEP?

    1. Hey Adam, I haven’t found a way to do that. I’ll post in the DJ Event Planner users group on Facebook and see what people say.

      Cheers!

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