Enquiring with wedding vendors: what belongs in the message

During the planning phase you write twenty or thirty of these messages. How they are built decides two things: how fast you get quotes, and how comparable those quotes are. Both hang on the same six fields.

The background is unsentimental: anybody who works weddings gets a great many enquiries in season and answers first the ones from which a booking can be read. That is not rudeness, it is capacity. Here is how your message lands in that category — with a template to copy.

Anyone who has ever sent a friendly message and heard nothing usually suspects a lack of interest. More often there are three other reasons, and you can influence all three.

• The message cannot be costed. “We are getting married next summer and are looking for a quote” contains not one quantity from which a price follows. An answer to it consists of questions, and questions cost time that is scarce in season.
• The date has long gone. Then there is often no reply at all, because a no feels awkward to write. Put the date in the first line and you at least get a fast no — which is far more valuable than silence.
• The message reads like a circular. A visible bulk enquiry to twelve addresses gets treated as lower priority, and nobody can be blamed for that.

From which follows the simplest rule for the whole planning phase: write fewer enquiries, but complete ones. Five well-built messages bring back more quotes than twenty terse ones, and they create less work on both sides.

A second rule concerns the order. Some trades can only be approached once others are fixed: no venue, no catering; no times, no music. Keeping to the order means less reworking — the overview is under the order in which to book vendors, and when each enquiry has to be out at the latest is worked backwards from your date by the timeline calculator. And if the venue is still open, settle that first, see finding a wedding venue.

These six belong in every enquiry, whatever the trade. They are best set out as a block rather than buried in prose — then they can be taken in within five seconds.

The last row is the most contested and worth defending. Many couples fear that a stated budget simply gets used up. In practice something else happens: with no budget you get the house's standard package, and that rarely matches what you had in mind. With a budget you get a recommendation about which option makes sense inside it — and that is the actual value of the advice.

One note on the guest count: a range is better than a number as long as the replies are not in. “70 to 90 people” is an honest statement everybody can work with. “About 80” suggests a precision you do not have in the first year of planning — and it later becomes the basis of an invoice.

What does not belong in a first enquiry: your whole story, a folder of pictures, a detailed wish list. That comes in the second step, once interest and availability are settled. A first message three screens long gets put aside for later and forgotten there.

The text below can be adapted for any trade. It is deliberately short, factual, and built so that the six facts are visible at once.

Subject: Enquiry — wedding on 12 June 2027, Fairview Barn

Hello,

we are getting married on Saturday, 12 June 2027, and are looking for support on the day. We found your work through our venue's recommendation; what we particularly liked is how calm your reportage feels.

The basics:

Date: Saturday, 12 June 2027
Venue: Fairview Barn, 412 Mill Road, Fairview — ceremony and reception in the same place
Timing: ceremony 2.30 pm, dinner from 6.00 pm, end open
Guests: 70 to 90 people
What we want: coverage from getting ready to roughly the first dance
Budget: we have set aside about X to Y for this item.

Is the date still free with you? If so, we would be glad of a quote, and equally glad of a suggestion about what makes sense within our budget.

Best wishes
Anna Reid and Jonas Marsh
Phone: (555) 010-0000

Three parts of that text do more than they look:

• The subject line with date and venue. It answers the availability question before the message is even opened.
• The one personal sentence. It shows the message did not go to twelve addresses at once. It has to be specific — “great pictures” does not count.
• The request for a recommendation within the budget. It turns a price enquiry into a request for advice, and it raises the reply rate noticeably.

Adapt the “what we want” block per trade: for a caterer the service style and the number of courses, for music the playing time and whether a PA is on site, for flowers the areas and the number of tables. Everything else stays the same.

Of the six facts, one is uncomfortable because it changes over months: the guest count. And it is at the same time the one on which most of the money hangs for catering, flowers, stationery and seating.

So it helps to keep three numbers apart:

1. The invitation list. Who you want to invite. Fixed early, but always too high, because not everybody comes.
2. The expectation. Your estimate of how many will accept. For enquiries that is enough — as a range.
3. The binding number. What you tell the caterer at the deadline. It comes from actual replies, not from an estimate.

For the enquiry phase number 2 is enough, and nobody expects more. What matters is that you mark it as a range and correct it unprompted as soon as something substantial changes. A supplier working on 90 people in February and hearing about 60 in May has to recost — and that is entirely fine, as long as they hear in time.

Number 3 is the one that creates work when it has to be gathered from messages, phone calls and scraps of paper. A reply that counts itself delivers it on the cut-off date as a finished list — including the details the suppliers need anyway: children with ages, dietary restrictions, travel. What that looks like is under online RSVP for your wedding, what you do with it under managing the guest list online, and the RSVP feature describes how the acceptance and the extra details arrive in one go.

The practical gain is not the convenience but the timing: you know earlier where you stand, and you can run the enquiries on a defensible range rather than on a hope.

After the enquiry comes the part many people find uncomfortable. It breaks down into three short routines.

Following up. If nothing arrives after seven to ten days, write once, pleasantly — with the same subject line, so the old message is findable. One sentence is enough: we wanted to check briefly whether our enquiry of 3 March arrived. After that, stop. Anyone who does not answer two messages either has no capacity or no interest, and both are an answer.

Collecting. Put the quotes into a single table, not into a mail folder. Three columns are enough to start with: supplier, scope in keywords, price with a note on whether tax is included. Only then is the detailed comparison worth doing — how that works is under comparing quotes.

Declining. Decline to everyone you do not book, as soon as you have decided. Two sentences are enough and no reason is needed. That is not only courtesy: the trade is small regionally, people know each other, and you may enquire again in two years for another party. In passing, an early no frees a date another couple is looking for.

Two organisational notes for the whole phase. First: keep the basic facts in one place you can both reach rather than hunting for them in every message — on a wedding website the date, addresses and times are there anyway and you can copy them from there. Second: as soon as times change, tell every supplier you have already booked, unprompted. The rough frame is in the running order; how the individual versions get distributed later is under sharing the timeline with your vendors.