Invitations

This depends on a few things. Do you have any guests who are not tech savvy? Will your wedding be very formal? If it's black tie or similar, electronic invitations would be out-of-place. Save-the-dates are more flexible, you could do either way or magnets.

Huge pros to the electronic route are way less time to assemble and distribute, probably lower cost (not sure as I never investigated this option in detail), and biggest of all to me, avoiding mail delivery issues. We had a few people who never received our save the date and one who said they never got the formal invite OR the save the date, despite me dropping everything off at the post office in person and verifying postage was correct, etc. Addresses were all correct, too. We also had people who received invites / BM proposal cards months after we mailed them, but some just never showed up at all. I don't know about any other countries, but I do know USPS has been pretty screwy since COVID started.

The con, of course is if you have guests who are not comfortable with technology and/or just not good about checking email, they won't see the electronic ones. I would've gone the electronic route if I hadn't known at least 20-30% of our guest list was iffy with email.

If it were me doing it over again, I'd probably go electronic and order a small number of physical invites (ideally in the same design) in case someone says they don't even have an email address that they check regularly (and also to have a keepsake just for us). Then follow up with people to make sure they got the email (probably best to do that for the mailed ones too, so at least this way you're saving time/cost in other places). Some guests will raise an eyebrow over that / think it's too informal, but after the crappy experience of getting married during a pandemic, I am personally over caring about people being judgmental over silly, superficial stuff like that. If it makes things easier for you and doesn't cost guests money or inconvenience them, then I say go for it.

View Quoted Comment Awesome thank you so much for that info! It helps out a ton! I think I might do electronic save the date. I’m undecided about actual invitations. To me it seems like a huge waste of money because people just throw them out anyways 😂 I’d rather have more alcohol money. Thank you so much!

View Quoted Comment And most of your guests would prob rather you spent the money on alcohol vs. a paper invite, too! LOL

I did digital Save the Dates and will do digital for Invitations too. It was THE BEST thing I could have done. It was affordable and saved a ton of time. Nice thing too is that people don’t really ‘loose’ or ‘throw them away’ because it’s right there on their phone. I didn’t bother with Greenvelope or any of those paid services. I simply downloaded a template off Etsy and texted it out. So easy!

Even in the age of technology, there is something unique about getting paper mail that isn’t junk or bills.


We have been guests at a couple weddings where the couples chose to do everything electronically and it backfired badly. Save the dates are very informal and unless you frequently communicate with whomever is sending the email, it has high potential of getting lost in spam folders. They have been done by phone for free for decades with no issues whatsoever. Electronic invitations are not all they are cracked up to be. Even with a largely younger crowd in our experiences as guests, the couples had next to no one show up on the wedding day because other guests we knew mentioned later that they were waiting for paper invites that never came. They assumed because the electronic invites were so informal that they were an unnecessary additional reminder while waiting for the actual invite in the mail.

Pros of actual paper invites are that you have a tangible card with information that can’t and won’t get lost or forgotten unless it is sent 12 weeks to several months before the wedding when no one is able to confirm their schedule. You don’t have something lost in cyberspace or that someone is unable to open without assistance. The same applies to reply cards, details cards and other inserts because not everyone will read a website even if they are tech savvy. Many invites are available in full sets that people are already familiar with and are cheaper than purchasing pieces individually.
Cons: honestly don’t know of any as a whole.

I sent out paper invitations although I do agree the money spent on paper invites can be very high and unnecessary. I ordered a single card invitation and postcard rsvp. This cost me less than $100 for about 40 invitations (75 guests). I think it’s nice to receive some things in the mail 🥰 and it’s a nice keepsake.

Paper invitation are always so nice!! Maybe get magnet ones? I get scared people would not save the digital one as they would save actual paper ones.... maybe just my experience of not saving important emails haha

how would your digital ones look like?

Thank you. This is what I needed to hear.

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Where is the second invitation from? The paper one. It's beautiful!

View Quoted Comment That one is Etsy as well! Here is the link:
https://etsy.me/3pNA666

We sent electronic save-the-dates and went through our wedding website withjoy.com. Guests received the email which has an e-card and our wedding website. They could even click on it and have it added to their Google or Apple calendar. It is really cool. At this point the wedding website only had the info we wanted everyone to have at this point, date, time, travel info, and a few photos. When we send invitations, we'll turn on the rsvp features.


The Pros are that it's free, everyone has easy access to the info on their phone, and it has cool features. The cons are that we had to ask around for email addresses for about half of our guests and some of the emails went to spam folder. However, another Pro is that the website has a tracking feature so I could tell when or if a guest hasn't opened the ecard. That showed me who to reach out to ask them to check their spam folder. It only happened to about 5 guests out of 60.

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TY! I hadn't thought of going through Etsy, but they are so pretty!