The moment you start sending your wedding invitations out to your friends and family, your special day starts to feel real and in touching distance.
A lot of couples will spend time planning and worrying about making these invitations as perfect as possible, but they shouldn’t be a cause of stress!
Like Heritage Venues are here to help you find the wedding venue of your dreams, we’re also here to help make every part of your wedding go as smooth as possible – that includes the invitations!
Here’s our guide to make sure you get your wedding invitations and save the dates just right.
What to include in a wedding invitation?
People will often refer to all the papers you include with your wedding invitation as the ‘Wedding Invitation Suite’ which consists of:
● The invitation
● Mailing envelope
● Postage
● A response card for people to let you know they’re attending
● Important information about directions to the venue and local hotel options
Once you have a theme for your wedding sorted, we recommend following that theme in all aspects – including the invitation.
Get yourself some personalised envelopes and hire a graphic designer to make your ideas come to life across all your printed goods.
When should you send save the dates?
Normally, couples will start to send save the dates out around six months before their wedding. This should be enough time for your guests to organise everything.
However, if you’re planning a destination wedding, or have a venue that’s far away from most of your guests, you might want to give them even more time to arrange everything.
When do you send out wedding invitations?
If you’ve already sent a save the date out for your wedding, you can leave your final wedding invitations until around 2-4 months before the big day.
Just don’t forget to include a deadline for RSVPs, as the longer you wait to hear back from your guests, the more stressful it becomes trying to organise food, drinks and seats.
What to write on a wedding invite?
You don’t need to write a whole novel on your invitations, just keep it super simple and give your guests the basic information they need.
As an example, here’s a very basic template that you could use in your wedding invitations.
You’re invited to the wedding of
[YOUR NAMES]
[DATE, TIME, LOCATION]
On the invitations, we’d avoid using the names of your guests. Instead, you can use the same invitation for every guest and just put their names on the envelope.
Trust us, this will save you time and money on printing, plus make it much easier when it comes to putting together your wedding invitation suite.
How to address wedding invitations?
Depending on who you’re sending your invitations to, there are a few different ways to address the envelope.
Here are some of the most common ways to address different people:
● A married couple with the same last name: “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith”
● A married couple with different last names: “Mrs. Jodie Stevens and Mr. John Smith”
● To an unmarried couple: “Mr. John Smith and Ms. Jodie Stevens”
● To a single female: “Ms. Jodie Stevens”
● To a single male: “Mr. John Smith”
● To a family, including children: “The Smith Family” or just “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith”
Should you send digital wedding invitations?
Everything seems to be going digital at the moment, should your wedding invitations be the same?
If you want to save time and money, giving out digital invitations can be a great alternative. You can still get design your invitations and personalise them to suit your tastes, but you don’t have to worry about the printing and postage costs.
The other plus about digital wedding invitations is that you can make it a lot easier for guests to RSVP as they don’t have to send their responses back to you in the post.
However, sending out physical wedding invitations is still the traditional thing to do. It gets your guests excited for the wedding and is a physical reminder of your special day and your guests’ involvement in it.
Especially for close family and friends, they may want to keep your invitation and may be disappointed to only receive their invite digitally.
Book your dream wedding with Heritage Venues
Now you’ve got your invitations sorted, let us help you organise everything else.
