Why Brides Ghost You After Inquiring (It's Not Your Prices)

You sent a proposal, you followed up, and you never heard back, and your first instinct goes to, my prices are too high, my work's not good enough, she found somebody better than me. That couldn't be further from the truth. The bride didn't ghost because of your prices. She ghosted because something in your email, your follow-up, didn't speak to her brain in the way that she makes decisions in order for her to say yes. Hey, I'm Marissa Grace. If you're new here, I spent a decade in the wedding industry as a bridal hairstylist, and I grew my business from $6,000 in my first year to generating over $728,000 cash collected in just 4 years as a solo bridal hairstylist. And today I'm going to show you exactly what's happening inside her head and why there's actually 4 types of brides sitting in your inbox right now, and you're probably communicating with them all in the same way. That's what's costing you bookings. So let's get into it. Okay, so first I want to talk about how humans actually make buying decisions because this is going to reframe everything. Humans buy with emotion first, and then we back it up with logic. It's literally how our brains are wired. Yeah, this million-year-old thing. Here's an example that can probably help you better understand this. You have the Sephora sale, comes around a few times a year. You add $500 of products to your cart that you probably didn't have sitting in your bank account, but you found it anyway because Sephora sale is happening. Pulled out that credit card, right? You get the foundations, you get the hair products, you get the price an air wrap that maybe you've been looking at for months. You check out, you see that number, but your logical brain goes, ah, it's a tax write-off. So now you've justified spending that $500 you otherwise didn't really have. Or I'm going to use this for my bride next weekend because this will go into my kit, and if I don't like this, I can put it into my kit. You justify that with logic. You decided the want because of the sale, and the logic came later. This is how your bride is deciding on hiring you as well. She didn't sit down and hire you because she had a spreadsheet and you were the most cost-effective option. I mean, hey, literally like 0.5% of the brides out there are like that. Maybe you've dealt with one, but majority of brides aren't doing that. She inquired and wanted to invest because of a reel she saw, because of how she saw you interact with one of your brides, because how she saw maybe some of your past brides commenting on your videos or reading the reviews and feeling that emotion. She felt emotionally connected to you before she booked, and that's to speed up the buying process. And so your job isn't to convince her, hey, this is why I'm the best, but it's to pull those emotions to connect, build that trust, and give her logical brain enough logic, data, analytics to back it up after she makes that decision. And when you understand that, your emails, your follow-ups, your proposals, they all make sense and make it really clear. Now let's talk about what's actually happening between the moment she finds you and the moment she actually books. Let's look at the buying journey. We have 4 phases. So we have awareness, consideration, decision, and then purchase. She started awareness the second she got engaged. So she's looking for vendors, she's searching for people who meet her needs. She's aware of the problem that she has. She moves down into consideration when she's talking out your highlights, your profile, binging all your reels like Netflix. Maybe she's in your DMs asking you some questions, asking her bridesmaids if they've heard of you or if they've ever worked with you. Then she gets down to decision. This is when she's in In your inbox, she's inquired, she's running the pros and the cons, maybe she's running it by her mom or her maid of honor. And then purchase, she signs the contract, she's yours. But here's the thing, every bride who moves through this journey moves at a different speed and needs to be spoken to in a different language because not all brides buy the same and not all brides have the same buying speed. And certain things can either block them or speed up her process. So here's what's blocking her from booking you: confusion. Your offer isn't clear, your pricing has hidden fees that has questions on. She doesn't know exactly what she's getting or if that look will be the same on her. To speed her up, you want to have clear communication telling her like exactly next steps. Have real clarity in your offer with transformations before and afters of clients. No urgency is going to block her from booking because she doesn't see, uh, nothing bad is going to happen if I don't respond to her right now or if I don't book right now. Speed her up by letting her know that your dates are limited and you have other brides inquiring. Information overload slows her down. That 5-page paragraph an inquiry email, yeah, she's skimming it and not reading it. Speed it up with simplicity. Take your email and put it in a ChatGPT and say, can you say this in the least amount of words possible? No social proof is going to block the booking because she doesn't trust you yet. Speed her up by having social proof at every interaction. Have it everywhere on your Instagram, have it everywhere within your emails, within your website, so every touch point she's seeing some kind of social proof. And the huge one that's going to speed up her booking process more than anything: communicating to her in a way that matches how she actually makes buying decisions, because not all brides buy the same. And if you're somebody who has Gen Z in your inbox, or you're somebody who went through the COVID era where brides were booking like crazy and now all of a sudden they're not, and your inbox feels weird, it feels different, you're like, how do I even talk to these people? It's because you've been talking to everybody the same, and it's not gonna work, and it hasn't worked for years. Which brings me to what I really need you to understand today, so listen up. But really quick before I get into that, because I want you to actually have something to lean that is personalized to your own business. If you want to know why your bridal business has slow-to-book brides, what's going on in your emails, what's happening within your social content, and what sales personality type you're showing up as, my Dying to Book Blueprint will show you in 3 minutes flat, and you gotta grab it down in the description box below. It'll give you a personalized breakdown of the email behaviors and things you're doing in your content that's leaving you left on read. Again, grab it down below before you send your next email. Okay, so there's 4 types of brides in your inbox right now, and they're actually the 4 buyer types and the reason maybe sending the same inquiry email to every single bride isn't working for you anymore. So to break down these buyer types super easy, let me give you an example. Let's just say you're at Sephora and you see 47 different options for shampoo and you're like, oh, okay. So there's 4 different ways that you will likely go about making your purchase decision of what shampoo you ultimately wind up buying, right? So I'm going to go through the different buyer types of how they would buy the shampoo. Really take note re-listen if you want to, but let me know and really try to understand which one you resonate with, okay? Because you're gonna have one that you resonate with and maybe even a secondary one, but you're gonna have a primary one. Okay, buyer type number 1, the driver buyer. She walks into Ulta, she sees all these different shampoo options. She clocks the before and after visuals on the wall before she even looks at the shampoos. Then she looks down and finds that exact shampoo, grabs it, heads to the checkout line super fast. She didn't to read the ingredient list. She didn't need to read reviews. She didn't need to ask her mom if she thought this was a good decision. And she doesn't need the life story of how this shampoo came out. She saw the transformation, trusted it, boom, she makes that decision fast. The second buyer type, the expressive buyer— this is me— she's not reading that label either, but for a completely different reason. She picks out the shampoo that she recognizes that her favorite influencer uses. She's seen her influencer friend talk about it, how much she loves this influencer and wants to feel connected with that connects with that person's story, how that person values life, all of the content that that person posts. She's always constantly liking it, commenting on it. She feels connected to the person who's recommending it, so that's the one she grabs super fast, heads to checkout. The expressive buyer in your inbox, she's been following you for 8 months. She's your biggest fan. She's literally the number one bride you want to attract with all of your content. She's left hard eyes on the last 11 Instagram stories that you have. She's been saving your post for months. She might not even be engaged, but when she does get engaged, she's reaching out to you. She's impulsive. She's gonna book same day. Your driver buyer, when she's in your inbox, she's the one who filled out your inquiry form, like, ready to commit to my hair person. She's much more likely to also book same day. You might get a vibe in her communication that she's super direct, very forward. She knows what she wants, but she might want to hop on a call so she can clear up some few details. She wants results. She wants authority. Now let's move into the third buyer type, the analytical buyer. She's in Ulta. She's looking at all her shampoo options. She spends about 45 minutes there. She's reading every label, she's reading all the ingredients, she's opening up Google, Reddit, she's looking at the reviews of this specific brand. She wants to know if it's sulfate-free, if it's going to work with this part of her hair. She's analyzing every little detail. She wants to know the review, she wants to know the verified purchase. She is not impulsive. She is Thoreau in every piece, and she does not want pressure. If somebody came up to her and was like, hey, can I help you out, do you need help looking for anything, she would be like, no, and run the other way so fast. Because she sees that as salesy. In your inbox, she inquired, and she's the one who's like dating around, searching for quotes. She asks very logical questions. She probably will have objections. She prefers email over sales calls because, again, she wants to get all the information and analyze it on her own time. She does not want to be pressured. And the fourth buyer type is the amiable buyer, literally the sweetest human alive, but she absolutely can't make a decision. So when she's in Ulta and she's looking at all of these options, she's overwhelmed. She really leans on her people because she can't make decision. So she's likely opening up her phone, she's sending screenshots to her besties saying, hey, which one do you think is the best? Have you ever tried this one? Maybe she's FaceTiming with her mom. Hey, I really like this shampoo, what do you think about it? And she's been standing there for 30 minutes because she's waiting on a response from her people, because she really loves input, she really loves collaboration, and she really loves somebody telling her which one to get. So when she lands in your inbox, she's going to be the one who's mentioning her mom, she's mentioning her maid of honor, she's saying Hey, my sister is my maid of honor and she really wants to do a ponytail and she has extensions. Can you work with that? Like she's more concerned about making sure her people are happy and she kind of comes secondary, but she's also somebody who's a little flighty. She might not book right away because she needs to physically be walked to the checkout line or not pushed, but she needs to be talked direct to in order to make the decision. And when she does have an objection, because she might have like, I'm still deciding, I don't know, it's kind of expensive. It's not that she doesn't want to book with you. It's that she's literally still deciding and needs more guidance. She wants to feel like you guys are in this together, and she will give you an objection. But again, that's not a reason for it to be a lost booking. She's just looking for a reason to justify it with that logical brain. Help her justify it. So what do I want you to take away from this? Is that not all brides buy the same. And if you've been communicating the same way with every single bride in your inbox, that's not going to work anymore. And so the bride that ghosted you didn't leave because of your prices. It's because you didn't communicate to the way her brain needed it. And again, if you're standing in Ulta staring at 47 shampoos, what buying decision do you go through? And then look at how you're communicating with your brides. Does it match up? Because you likely— however you are, that's the kind of content you're putting out. So that's likely the buyer type you're attracting in the most. And the ones who are the problem child are going to be your analytical. Yeah. And so the emails that you're sending out, the way that you're communicating, even in your social media, that's the mismatch. And the fix isn't rewriting all of your emails or customizing every single email that you're sending to every single bride, I believe that you can still automate and templatize. You want to make sure that you're speaking to all 4 buyer types to make them feel confident, comfortable, and secure, and trust you to speed up their purchasing decisions. Now, if you're sitting there and you're like, oh my God, how do I find out what buyer type is sitting in my inbox? How do I speak to each buyer type? How do I— what emails do I write? That's exactly what I cover in Dying to Book. I have a self-led version. The mini-mind is currently sold out and closed. So round 2, not sure when that's going to reopen or if it will. Goal. But if you want to get the pre-recorded lessons and access to every single replay from our live calls, you want to get into Dying to Book Self-Led. I'll hand you over the roadmap so you can turn your Instagram into a bridal booking machine, confidently selling your services even when you're offline. And so you're speaking to every single buyer type in her love language so you can speed up her buying process, and no more slow-to-book brides. The link is down below for you. And if you found this helpful, definitely comment down below which buyer type resonates with you. Share it with a friend that would find super valuable, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye!