When you’re planning an event, one of the biggest questions is often one of the simplest: how much is it going to cost?
For wedding and event spaces, answering that question isn’t always straightforward. Guest numbers, dates, food, drinks and optional extras can all affect the final price. That can mean lengthy brochures, back-and-forth emails and manual quotes before a potential customer has a clear idea of what their event might cost.
We wanted to make that process easier for our longstanding client, Larkspur Lodge.
Working with the Cheshire wedding venue, Childsey created a fully customisable online quoting tool that allows couples to build their wedding and see a live estimate as they go.
Building a Custom Online Quote Calculator
The idea behind the tool is simple: give potential customers useful pricing information in an easy, interactive format.
Couples start by choosing their wedding date and guest numbers, before working through the different elements they’d like to add to their day. They can see options for canapés, their wedding breakfast, drinks packages, evening food and additional extras, with their estimate updating as they make their selections.
Once they’ve finished, they can email themselves the quote or take the next step and book a viewing at Larkspur Lodge.
This gives couples more freedom to explore what works for their plans and budget, while creating a much smoother journey from researching the venue to making an enquiry.
Automating Complex Pricing and Quotes
Wedding planning involves plenty of decisions, and understanding costs early in the process can make those decisions much easier.
Larkspur Lodge already provides couples with information about its venue, packages and pricing through its website and brochures. Their new quote builder takes this a step further by turning the pricing into a customisable experience.
Rather than simply reading through different options, couples can see how their choices affect their estimated total. Want to change the guest numbers? Try a different food option? Add an extra? They can explore different combinations themselves and get a clearer picture of what their day could look like.
Importantly, the tool makes it clear that the figure provided is an estimate, with the final quote confirmed by the venue. This gives users useful information without replacing the personal service that comes later in the wedding planning process.
A Better Experience for Customers and Venues
A quoting tool isn’t only useful for the person making the enquiry. It can also help venues create a more efficient customer journey.
Giving people the opportunity to explore pricing before getting in touch means enquiries can come from customers who already have a better understanding of the options available to them. Instead of starting every conversation with basic pricing questions, venue teams can spend more time discussing the wedding itself.
It also gives potential customers something increasingly important online: control.
People are used to researching, comparing and making decisions digitally. Making useful information available at the right point in that journey can remove unnecessary barriers and help someone feel more confident about taking the next step.
Built Around Your Venue
We created the Larkspur Lodge quote builder specifically for the venue, but the same concept can be adapted for other event businesses.
Our quoting tools are fully customisable and built from scratch around the individual venue. That means the experience can reflect your own packages, pricing structure, guest capacities, food and drink options, extras and customer journey rather than trying to fit your business into an off-the-shelf system.
Whether you run a wedding venue, party venue, corporate events space or another business where customers need to choose between different packages and options, a bespoke quote builder could make the enquiry process much simpler.
Need a Custom Quote Builder for Your Business?
Digital marketing isn’t only about bringing more people to your website. What happens once they arrive matters too.
Creating useful digital tools can make your website work harder for your business, improve the experience for potential customers and turn interest into more meaningful enquiries.
At Childsey, we can build bespoke web applications and custom business software around your own requirements, rather than trying to make your processes fit an off-the-shelf system. From complex pricing rules and customer-facing calculators to internal tools, booking systems, lead-generation tools, dashboards, integrations and automated workflows, we can create a solution tailored to your business.
This approach can work across a wide range of industries. Whether you run a venue, manufacturing business, professional service, construction company, ecommerce business, agency, hire company or another organisation with a process that could work better online, we can explore what custom software could do for you.
Want to see what we created? Explore the Larkspur Lodge quote builder and build a sample wedding estimate for yourself.
If you run an event venue and would like your own fully customisable quoting tool, get in touch with Childsey for a chat. We can create a solution built around your venue, your pricing and the way your customers plan their events.
