Every invitation we work on is unique, just like your special day! To help you decide upon the wording you would like to include we have put together a little guide below.
SAVE THE DATE
In the UK, wedding invitations are usually sent a lot earlier than in other countries so save the dates aren't always strictly necessary. However, if you know your wedding date already but still have a lot of other details (like exact start & finish timings) to finalise, you might want to get your date out there with your guests, especially if you are getting married on a Saturday or bank holiday over the peak spring/summer wedding period. Its advisable to only send save the dates to those who you plan to definitely invite to the entire wedding (i.e. not to evening guests or those on your maybe list!).
Things to include on a save the date:
- Date of the wedding (no need for timings)
- Couple's names: try to include surnames if you will be inviting people who might not know your partner's name (e.g. extended family, parents' friends) so might confuse you with another couple or if you have common names, or if you just want something a bit more formal.
- Location of the wedding: this can be specific if you have already finalised your venue or can be more general, i.e. the town that the wedding will take place in: "London", for example. If you are getting married abroad or if lots of your guests will be travelling from overseas, you should include the town and country of the wedding (e.g. London, United Kingdom or Phuket, Thailand.) so that guests can begin to think about flights and travel arrangements.
Optional:
- Website: If you have a lot of information for your guests and don't plan to send your invites until much closer to your wedding date, you might want to include your wedding website on the save the date. Make sure you add some information to the website before you send the save the dates though - even if it's just a placeholder to say "check back here in a couple of months for more information or get in touch with [your name] if you need some help with travel arrangements."
INVITATION - Ceremony & Reception
There are so many different ways of wording invitations that it can feel overwhelming working out what to include on your invitations. Lots of the way that things are worded are steeped in tradition but ultimately, it's totally up to you how you want to phrase the words! Below are the key things you should include with some examples of how you could word them and then a few optional items that you may or may not want to include.
Key things to include on wedding invitations:
- The actual inviting: This could be phrased as: "you are cordially invited to" OR "[name] & [name] request the pleasure of your presence at their wedding" OR "you are invited to celebrate the marriage of..." OR even as simple as "you are invited to the wedding of". For more traditional invitations, you might want to include your parents names in this section as parents of the bride traditionally sent the invitations to guests.
- Couples names: First names only OR first and last names OR first, middle and last names. E.g. Sophie & Ben OR Sophie Gowing & Ben Hodges OR Sophie Ellen Gowing & Benjamin Timothy Hodges.
- Location: This might be just one place if you are getting married and having the reception at the same place OR two places if you are having the ceremony somewhere different to the reception venue. It's usual to include the town and postcode of the venues so nobody turns up at the wrong place on the day but you could just include the town and then include the full address on your wedding website if you would prefer.
- Time: You should include your start and end time on the invitation. If you only have one wedding venue (see above "Location" point) you might want this together: "2:00pm - 11:30pm" OR "two in the afternoon until eleven thirty in the evening" OR separately "Ceremony to begin at 2:00pm" and then further down the invitation you might have "Carriages at 11:30pm". If you have multiple venues (e.g. church & reception) you might have "[ceremony location] at two in the afternoon followed by a reception at [reception location] to begin at three thirty in the afternoon" and then "carriages at eleven thirty" OR "[ceremony location] at 2:00pm followed by a reception at [reception location] 3:30pm - 11:30pm".
Optional:
- Dress code: It's always good to give guests some kind of guidance of what to wear as guests feel comfortable when they are wearing similar attire to everyone else; however, if you have a wedding website, you don't need to include it on the invitation unless you want to of course! If you do include it on the invitation, try to keep the wording short, e.g. "Dress code: smart casual" OR "Dress code: cocktail" OR Dress code: jacket and tie" OR "Dress code: morning suit". There are lots of helpful wedding advice websites out there if your guests need any clarifications on what dress code wordings mean!
- Order of the day: some couples like to include key timings of the day on their invitations. If you do wish to do this, it's best to keep the number of timings to a minimum to avoid making your invitations too text heavy and also to allow you some flexibility should your timings change a bit in the run up to your wedding. If you want to include a few key timings, I wouldn't recommend any more than the ceremony start time, meal, first dance / dancing to kick off and then the end of the event unless you would like a separate card with this on.
- RSVP: To save paper and money, lots of people include the RSVP information on their invitations. Space is usually quite limited so there is usually only space for a limited amount of RSVP information. This is usually something like "Please RSVP before [date] at [wedding website address / email address". If you want people to post a physical RSVP card back to you, you will need a separate RSVP card to do this as it won't fit onto the invitation.
- Additional information: There will not be enough space on your invitation for additional information like recommended places to stay, registry etc., but you can add in "find more information about our wedding" to your RSVP statement with something like: "Please RSVP before [date] and find more information about our wedding at [wedding website address]
- Message from the couple: Some couples like to include a message at the very bottom of the invitation along the lines of "we hope you can make it" OR "we can't wait to celebrate with you" OR "Drinks, dinner and merriment to follow" OR "book your flights and pack your bags" - for international weddings.
INVITATION - Evening
Evening invitations usually have different information on them than your main invitation. For example, you might not want your evening guests to RSVP to your wedding website as you won't want them to get confused and see all the information about your ceremony timings etc. For this reason, you might have a separate email address or even a different wedding website for evening guests to RSVP to. It's likely you won't need your evening guests to RSVP as early as your full day guests either so you can give a longer RSVP deadline.
Key things to include on evening invitations:
As per the ceremony and reception invitations, you should include:
- The actual inviting: but you should specify that it is an evening/afternoon reception: for example, "you are cordially invited to an evening reception to celebrate the marriage of" OR "please join [name] & [name] at an evening reception to celebrate their marriage".
- Couples names
- Reception location: As you may not be sharing your wedding website details with your evening guests, you should include the town and postcode of the reception venue on your evening invitations.
- Start and end time of evening reception.
- RSVP: Most couples do not send RSVP cards to evening guests as it can be fairly expensive, especially if you have a lot of evening guests on top of your full day guests. For this reason couples tend to include a line or two on the evening guest invitation of how they should RSVP. For example you may have something like "Please RSVP by [date] at [number / website / email address]".
RSVP CARD - If not including on your invitation
Separate RSVP cards can help to make your wedding stationary feel more premium. More and more couples are using RSVP cards to direct their guests to their wedding websites over the more traditional postal RSVPs as it can make collecting RSVPs from guests a little less labour intensive for them than chasing their guests to RSVP by post, then typing up their response into an excel document whereas wedding websites can automate a lot of this for the time stretched couples! Inky Acorn Designs can do whichever option you would prefer though so we've split the two different kinds of RSVP cards out below to help guide you:
RSVP by wedding website things to include:
- RSVP title: Usually the RSVP card will include "RSVP" somewhere on the design to help signpost the recipient what the card is about.
- RSVP by date: Try to make your RSVP by date much earlier than it actually needs to be. This is because guests often receive wedding invitations in the post and then totally forget about them so you want to allow yourself plenty of time to chase up guests to RSVP before you actually have to financially commit to your final guest numbers with your wedding venue.
- Additional information: You might want to include a few words like "and find more information about our wedding" OR "and find more information about travel and accommodation" before the wedding website address.
- Wedding website: Try and keep the web address as simple as possible and avoid lots of numbers. For example, www.weddings.com/bethanyclarkeandjoshbolton is much easier for the recipient to type into their browser than www.weddings.com/bethanyandjosh130420
- Wedding website password (if applicable): Similar to the above point, if you can change your password to words instead of numbers, this will make it easier for your guests and reduces the margin of error. It does of course mean that your wedding website might be a touch less secure though, so that is also something to consider.
RSVP by postal card things to include:
- RSVP title: Usually the RSVP card will include "RSVP" somewhere on the design to help signpost the recipient what the card is about.
- RSVP by date: Try to make your RSVP by date much earlier than it actually needs to be. This is because guests often receive wedding invitations in the post and then totally forget about them so you want to allow yourself plenty of time to chase up guests to RSVP before you actually have to financially commit to your final guest numbers with your wedding venue.
- Who the RSVP is from: As you'll be receiving lots of identical cards back, you need to know who the RSVP is from. Usually this features on the RSVP card as "I/We" then a long dotted line for the guest to fill in who the card is from.
- Attending/Not attending: This is usually a tickbox. Some couples like to add in fun phrases here like "will be there with bells on" or "devastated to miss this!" or you can just keep it simple with "will be attending" and "will not be able to attend".
- Meal choice: This depends on how complex your meal choices are. If you want your guests to select an option for each course, you might be better off using a wedding website where you have all the space you need to collect this data. If you just want to know if they would like meat, fish or vegetarian and then any dietary requirements, you can have a series of tickboxes for your guests to fill in. Have a think about what information your venue will need from you before the wedding to help you decide so that you can put everything on the RSVP card and not have to worry about getting in touch with guests multiple times to check things (e.g. if you are planning on having a smoked salmon starter, try and include a tickbox in the dietary requirements section for "no seafood". In our experience, not liking seafood is a fairly common thing though guests tend not put it down as a dietary requirement if you just leave a dotted line for them to fill in, yet might really dislike seafood so your starter will go wasted!)
INFO CARD
Separate information cards can give your invitation suite a premium feel to them and ensures that any key information you want to communicate to your guests does not get lost on a wedding website which can hold a lot of information that some guests may only skim through.
Key things you could include:
- Directions: If your venue is particularly difficult to find OR if the postcode takes you to the wrong place on a satnav/map app OR there is absolutely no phone signal around your venue, then include some concise details about how to find the venue like "take the first left after All Saints Church and continue down the gravel road for half a mile until you reach [venue name]". Most guests will just use a satnav/gps to find the venue otherwise so you don't need to include directions if it's simple to find.
- Accommocation: If you have booked out rooms at a hotel/guesthouse, you could share information like "we have reserved a number of rooms at the [name of accommodation venue] until [date they are reserved until]. If you would like to book a room please contact [name of accommodation contact number/email] and use our discount code [code details].
Woaaah information overload!
If you have specific wording you would like in mind, we will happily work with it; however, if all of the above makes you feel totally overwhelmed, please don't worry! We can just send you a list of specific key information we need from you (e.g. couples names, venue location, timings) and we can customise your wedding invitations with this information and use wording that has been popular with our previous couples.