Wedding Invitation Etiquette You Must Know

If your wedding is the first event you are organizing and you opted to not use the help of a wedding planner then I suggest you read my post regarding wedding invitation etiquette. You might find that if you don’t follow some of the guidelines I will outline here, none of the guests would come!

Image: Joann.com

The Planning

You should leave at least a 3-month lead time from selecting the right wedding invitation vendor to the time you send the wedding invitations to your guests.

The Invitation

The design and type of your wedding invitation would normally set the tone of your wedding. If you are planning to have a casual or informal wedding then there is no need to make your wedding invitation elaborate. If you having a wedding motif, it is also nice to have that color included as part of the design of your wedding invitation.

Wedding Invitation Wording

It’s really up to you what you want to put in it, the most important parts are the date, time, venue and type of affair. Anything other than that are “nice to haves”. If your parents are paying for the entire wedding or shouldering most of the wedding expenses then it’ll be nice for their names to be included in the invitations. There are a lot of modern invitations out there now that gives the ability for couples to do what they want with the wordings of their invitation.

The RSVP

Some couples include a separate RSVP cards for those guests. We didn’t as we knew our guests would either ring or email their response. What we included at the bottom of our invitation are: when to RSVP by, who to RSVP to and the contact details (email and phone). I assigned my Maid of Honor to chase up the guests for their response. I included her name in the RSVP information. If the guests have not responded by the deadline you have given them, get your Maid of Honor to follow them up. You need to confirm numbers for catering purposes.

The Wedding Envelopes

I’ve always loved receiving wedding invitations where my name on the envelope was handwritten. We hire a calligrapher to do ours to ensure that we have gorgeous handwriting on each of the envelopes. Proper etiquette also indicates that envelopes should be addressed by hand rather than typewritten or horror of horrors, printed from the computer!

Mailing Invitations

At our wedding, we mailed our wedding invitations 6 weeks before the wedding. I found this lead time just right. It’s not too early that the guests forget aobut it but it’s not too late either that people have already made plans because you’ve given them little notice regarding your wedding.