How a wedding marketplace grew 900% with Zapier

When Andrew Bowker started planning his wedding, he expected the process to be romantic.

Instead, he was met with time-consuming “wedmin” that made the big day much more stressful than it needed to be. Realizing that how couples book suppliers needed to change, Andrew co-founded the marketplace wedissimo to streamline the process.

In just nine months, wedissimo grew an incredible 900%—and integral to that growth was automating their customer follow-up work with Zapier. Here’s how they put it all together.

Challenge: Manual lead management was slowing down their growth

Wedissimo’s mission is to make wedding planning easier. But their lead management process was…a diamond in the rough.

After one couple booked a call with a supplier using wedissimo’s partner application CatchApp, the team had to record meeting details, personalize follow-up emails, and ensure that no lead fell through the cracks. All manually.

The process wasn’t just time-consuming but also prone to errors. Wrong meeting times, incorrect names in emails, and delayed follow-ups were frequent, and with such a small team, these errors were hard to prevent.

“We made loads of mistakes and worst of all, it was completely unscalable,” said Andrew. “It was basically going to be a hard limit on our ability to grow.”

The team realized they needed a more efficient, reliable, growth-ready workflow if they were to meet their ambitious goals.

Solution: They automated follow-ups with Zapier

Andrew and his team tried Zapier to create a powerful, business-critical workflow that could automate the entire follow-up process. They started by building a bespoke CatchApp integration with the Zapier developer platform, joining Zapier’s ecosystem of more than 7,000 integrations.

“It meant not having to build our own public API, which can be awkward and has security concerns,” said Oliver Lamming, CTO of wedissimo. “Being able to use Zapier made it very straightforward and allowed us to plug into a lot of existing partners.” 

From there, it was all about setting up the right workflow. 

Here’s how theirs works:

• Scheduling calls: The magic begins when a couple or supplier books an introductory call using wedissimo’s scheduling software. This triggers a Zap to create a new contact in their customer relationship management (CRM) system, ActiveCampaign.

• Outreach: When someone reaches out through wedissimo’s website (again, either a couple or supplier), wedissimo connects with ChatGPT to analyze the message. If ChatGPT determines a supplier or customer needs to respond, a WhatsApp message gets sent to that contact. Or, if the conversation has come to a natural end—for example, a supplier is already booked on a particular date—it prevents further follow-up.

• Monitoring meetings: To ensure secure meetings between customers and suppliers, calls are reviewed and transcribed using ChatGPT through Fireflies.ai. These summaries are then shared back to wedissimo.

• Post-call nurturing: After the supplier call, Zapier triggers a series of personalized nurture emails from ActiveCampaign sent at pre-defined intervals. The emails are customized with the couple’s and supplier’s key information, increasing conversion and completely removing this manual task.

Results: A match made in automation

Introducing automation and AI into their workflows was, as Andrew called it, “a game changer.”

With Zaps, wedissimo saw its conversion rates from initial calls to bookings soar from 30% to 50%. This increase in conversion massively boosted revenue, which the team credits in part for their rapid growth.

“The impact on our revenue has been huge,” said Andrew. We’ve eliminated the time spent on post-call emails, saving us 100% of the effort previously required.”

Beyond conversion metrics, Andrew and the team feel confident that building their business with AI and Zapier is future-proofing their growth. They believe that for all businesses, AI is the future—but businesses that use a common platform, where data is accessible across apps, will come out on top. 

“Zapier will play a huge part in this, as we already see the inevitability of needing to use different systems,” Andrew adds. “Unless we want to build everything ourselves, we will need to connect systems under one platform, so that as AI evolves, we’ll better connect our data.”

Wedissimo isn’t slowing down anytime soon: They’re gearing up to automate even more on Zapier. Their next steps include streamlining their CRM data exports and improving the integration between messaging and call booking. By cutting out that “wedmin,” wedissimo will be in an even better position to help couples focus more on the romance and excitement of wedding planning.