Timing is everything
You want your wedding invitation to reach your guests before they have booked other social events. On the other hand, you don’t want it to be sent so early that it gets misplaced and forgotten.
Send your invitations to local guests five weeks prior to the wedding date.
Telegraph the formality
Don’t send a formal invitation if the wedding is to be informal. And the reverse also is true.
Engraving, formal fonts, expensive paper, formal wording, wax seals: these scream formal wedding and they give your guests a heads up about what to wear to your wedding.
The expectations begin with the invitation.
Getting confirmation
Some modern couples are relying on getting a response via e-mail. Others don’t see the purpose in having to put return postage on the acceptance card that gets mailed back.
If you decide to reduce this expense, chances are you will pay hugely at the other end. Not everybody keeps stamps on hand, so your return cards may get put aside and forgotten. And e-mail isn’t the answer, either. Not everybody (and certainly not every age group) uses e-mail as their primary way of communicating.
The result can be an incomplete or inaccurate attendance supplied to your caterer. You don’t want one or two people arriving and finding there’s no dinner or seat for them. Alternately you don’t want to pay for dinners for people you assumed were attending but are no-shows.
Invite yourself
- Mail an invitation to yourself before you mail to your guests. If the envelope and interior is other than standard size, this lets you view how it traveled through the mail.
- Ask the post office to hand cancel each envelope if you want to avoid stamped bar codes on the envelope.
- Use real stamps instead of metered stamps. Metered stamps look like junk mail – and also look as if you cheaped out and used your bosses mail machine!
- Have the mailing weighed at the post office to assure you are using sufficient postage.
