How to get your wedding couples to Vote for you.

Client voting sits at the very heart of TWIA. Only the recent wedding coujples of each entrant can Vote for them in TWIA each year. This makes TWIA firmly based on user experience. We think this is absoluitely vital to running a credible and rigorous awards programme.

In TWIA 2025 (the current Awards) only couples who got married between 02.10.23 – 30.09.24 may Vote for the suppliers they used for their weddings. One Vote per couple and only after their wedding has taken place.

So, you’ve entered TWIA; congratulations! Here are some top tips on getting those all important Votes in…

YOUR UNIQUE VOTER URL

Your Unique Voter URL is the web link you need to send to your eligible wedding couples so they can Vote for you.

• You’ll find it in the centre of your Judging Profile Admin Dashboard when you LOG IN.
• Your eligible couples can only Vote for you via your Unique Voter URL.
• Why not click on yours to see what we ask your Voters to do when Voting for you? Just don’t complete the form and Vote for yourself, ok?!

REMEMBER: It’s one vote per couple and only after their wedding has taken place. Please stress this to your couples as ineligible votes may count against you.

 

REMEMBER: YOUR CLIENTS REALLY DO WANT TO VOTE FOR YOU…

…but they’re busy being happily married etc.

• Compile a list of all your eligible couples (who got married between 10.10.22 and 02.10.23).
• Use this list to keep track of who has Voted and who hasn’t. (You can see who has voted when you LOG IN to your Judging Profile Admin Dashboard.)
• Set up a time table to send regular reminder emails.
• They WILL vote for you! It’s human nature to put things off until the deadline is just around the corner; we all do it!
• You are not alone. Each year, about 50% of the 25,000 votes we get are placed in the final three weeks befiore voting closes.

 

USE AN EMAIL APP

You might well be using one already but we know that many people don’t.

Apps like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor etc are incredibly useful and powerful tools. If you aren’t using one, you should! They are a great way of automating and tracking emails which, from a general business perspective, is great for building a warm and engaged audience. For TWIA they can really take the pain out of the admin of getting your couples to Vote for you.
I like Mailchimp. It’s free to a point, you can upload your contacts and tag them in any way that works for you.

You can then design and send personalised emails to each of your Voters and see who has opened and clicked on them etc. You can automate a series of emails depending on what people do with previous emails and depending on what tags they have. This way, only those who dont have the ‘Voted’ tag will be sent your reminders to Vote. Simple!

It would definitely be worth investing some time in learning how to use one of these apps. They are really great business tools.

BCC

If an email app is way too complicated, simply using your existing email can work fine.

• Draft a single email asking your eligible couples to Vote for you.
• Copy and paste all your eiligible Voter contact details into the ‘BCC’ field. (This means ‘Blind Carbon Copy’ and refers back to written or typed paperwork in the pre-digital good old days.)
• Each recipient will receive the same email but they wont be able to see who else has received it.
• When they reply to you they will only reply to you and not everyone else.
• You’ll still have to manually track people and you can’t automate the process but it’ll save you sending individual emails to each and every eligible couple.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Posting your Unique Voter URL on social media requires some careful consideration.

• You need to very carefully explain the eligibility rules and make sure that ineligible people do not vote for you as these votes may count against you.
• This is a good blanket policy especially if this is how you and your couples are used to communicating but beware of the pitfalls.
• Don’t rely on SM alone.

INCENTIVES – NO!

Please don’t incentivise your eligible clients to Vote for you by offering vouchers or discounts etc. It’s not in the spirit of the Awards and we’ll take a very dim view if we hear about it.
Your couples should want to Vote for you because you have done a great job for them, not because they might get something in return.