After many months (and a few quarrels!), you and your partner have narrowed down your choices for your wedding venue, guest list, and date, leaving you to make the finishing touches. During these moments of your wedding planning process, everything starts to feel real, and you might begin to turn your attention toward the finishing touches for your big day.
From drafting up the seating arrangements and finalizing the menu to decorating the tabletops and labeling table places – there are many finishing touches to add. While taking care of tasks involving your wedding stationary, like the latter, you might also want to make some decisions about your invitations since there is much to consider between the style, font, insert, and costs.
So much more than a piece of paper, your wedding invites establish the tone for your wedding, the festivities following the ceremony, and filling your guests in on all the details above everything else. Whether you’d like to work alongside a local stationer or prefer to use a wedding wording tool to send out virtual invitations – we outline several things to bear in mind below.
Paperless Vs. Virtual
Traditionally, wedding invites are paper-based, but thanks to recent technological changes, sending invitations directly to someone’s email inbox has become possible. Virtual invitations have become popular in the wedding community for various reasons, from reducing the world’s paper consumption and saving you time to minimizing costs and making the RSVP process easier.
As well as possessing all the above benefits, virtual invites don’t slack in the way of aesthetics either and can help you set the tone for the entire day. So, whether you’d like an elegant, traditional invitation or a stark, modern-looking one, you can rest assured knowing that you’ll be able to find a virtual invitation no matter your tastes.
If you’d like to discover more about the benefits of sending paperless invites or to get a taste of some of the designs you could choose from, consider visiting providers’ websites, such as Greenvelope.
On their site, you can choose from hundreds of designs, read customer testimonials, and even take advantage of their wedding wording tool to make your wedding invitations as unique as possible. Consider visiting their site or contacting them directly to find out more today.
Don’t Overcrowd The Invite
Whether you’re sending out invitations for a birthday, retirement, baby shower, moving, or graduation party, cramming as much information as possible onto the invite can be tempting. Since your invitations serve so much more than a fancy piece of paper, they tell your guests all the ins and outs of the event, from dates, dress code, tone, and much more.
However, you don’t need to put everything on your invite to make it cohesive – just the essentials will do! Instead, stick to the key points: hosts’ names, dates, locations, times, and RSVP information. Trying to squeeze anything more onto the invite will make it look unorganized and inelegant – which is not the lasting impression you want guests to have about your special day.
Once you’ve listed the key points on your invite, if you still feel guests need more information like directions, dress codes, and details about post-ceremony activities, you can always follow up your invites with an enclosure card, post them on the social media page dedicated to your wedding, or your wedding website, which can provide all the information you couldn’t put on your actual invites.
Remember To Say Thank-You
Weddings are often sizeable affairs, so when the RSVPs eventually start rolling in, it can be a challenge to track whom you’ve thanked for confirming their attendance and whom you haven’t. Therefore, to ensure that you don’t miss anyone out, it is worth using organizational tools like guest list manager tools or pen-and-paper wedding binders to ensure you stay on top of thank-you notes.
These pieces of organizational equipment will also come in handy weeks after the ceremony, as this is when you and your partner will have time to sit down and go through the gifts you received on the day. Unless you have an unmatched memory, another challenge can be remembering who gifted you what – which is why it’s also helpful to include this information in your binder/manager.
Using tools like the ones mentioned above, you can make your thank-you notes as timely as possible and ensure you don’t leave anyone hanging! Try to make your thank-you notes within two weeks (if you received their gift before the ceremony), a month (if they gave it to you on the day), and a week when confirming their attendance.
Send Invites Per Household, Not Per Head
Although many wedding guests may keep your invitation as memorabilia of your special day, it is worth remembering that only some on your guestlist require one. Since sending out, invites per head can eat into your wedding budget, it is more cost-effective if you go through your guest list and group them by household.
For instance, co-habiting couples will get one invitation; separated couples will get one each; families will get one, and so on. The only exceptions to this rule will be anyone who lives independently and students who no longer live in their family home.