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You're engaged, you're getting ready to let your guests know all the wheres and whens of your wedding, and you're looking at the price of printed invitations. Spoiler alert: they're pricey, both from a money perspective and from an environmental perspective.
What if I told you there was a service that offered you totally customizable online wedding invitations with RSVP tracking, a digital resource page (aka wedding website!), and so many more features that gave you all the elegance of a printed invitation without the hefty cost to your wallet and to the Earth? Let's meet our partner, Greenvelope.
Greenvelope is a Seattle-based company that strives to deliver super elegant, quirky, and chic electronic wedding invitations by emulating the experience of opening a printed invitation. You'll have access to the creative work of indie designers, and an effortless user experience with guest tracking, RSVPs, lists, and more that you'd never get with a printed invite. Hell yes.
Digital wedding invitations and online save the dates have been etiquette friendly for years now so there's no stigma in making the more green choice. If you're the creative type, you can upload your own design, tailor an existing design to your tastes, or choose a turnkey design from a ton of awesome options to match your aesthetic. Each invitation is delivered complete with personalized digital envelope, liner, stamp, and RSVP tracking. It has the feel of a printed invitation but with all the bells and whistles you want in the digital age. It's the best of all worlds (and helps to save our world at the same time!).
What's the experience of digital wedding invitations on the guests' end?
Upon receiving their personalized digital suite, your guests will be directed to your optional details page after viewing your card. You can add music, maps, calendar links, photos, gift registries, hotel information, and more. Your invitation can lead your guests directly to a fully customizable wedding website!
They'll experience gorgeous designs from local artists that feature your hand-chosen customizable text, photos, envelopes, and links. There's full support for whatever way your guests like to receive their info: on their desktop, mobile phones, and tablets.
Here are some of the features you'll get with digital wedding invitations that you can't get with a traditional printed invitation:
- RVSP and guest tracking
- Specify which guests are allowed to bring Plus 1s
- Link household guests to receive one shared invitation
- Group tags: Organize contacts with group tags for easy sorting and filtering later
- Surveys for attendance to weddings and weekend parties, meal options, music requests, or any questions you want to ask
Plus, as I learned in trying to send my own digital save-the-date without a service like this, you'll avoid the spam folder when sending in bulk! Send attachments, surveys, and more information as you plan with their messaging tools.
Pricing
Greenvelope's options are much cheaper than most invitation packages with all of the digital additions and features. Check out their pricing here and start a trial to see if you like it.
The GREEN in Greenvelope
By creating a positive online experience, Greenvelope hopes more hosts will consider sending invitations electronically for formal events to help save trees, time, and money. You can use their services for other types of parties, too!
To further help in our environmental goals, they donate a percentage of every sale to Mountains to Sound, a non-profit organization that maintains forests.
Do digital wedding invitations actually work?
Here are a few reviews from real customers who used Greenvelope's digital invitations to keep all of their wedding guest planning organized…
“I used Greenvelope for my wedding save the dates and invitations. You can customize templates to your heart's content: add or remove text, change fonts, colors, add other images, etc. I received many comments from guests who appreciated the eco-friendly vibe.
Greenvelope makes it SO EASY for guests to RSVP (open email, click yes or no). You can also achieve maximum creeper status and see which guests haven't even opened the invite yet, which makes gives you a nice opportunity to check in with a text or social media message. Only one of about 140 guests accidentally deleted the invite. No one else had issues with it, not even my 85-year-old grandma!
We also used the service to track responses to mandatory (meal preference) and voluntary (favorite dance song) questions. The website does everything for you, then they represent the data in pie charts which is a Type A person's dream. All for a little more than $100 – almost equal to how much it would have cost for postage!! No issues to report from this happy bride!”
-Beth N.
“I no longer waste gobs of time tracking down RSVPs, meal choices, and guest names. Guests cannot hit submit without my requirements and automatic reminders get sent to unopened or late responders. I can upload my own design or use a template with lots of options I control.”
-Allison C.
“It has so much more functionality then other online invite sites — from changing a text's font, size and color to adding your own music and photos — and it has superior tracking features. This is by far the best, most user-friendly online invite site — I can't say enough good things about it.”
-Michelle
“I was hesitant at first to send my wedding invitations online vs. the traditional paper invitations, but I'm so happy I did so. I was able to personalize my invitation with photos and music and links and directions… I got lots of compliments 🙂 The Greenvelope team is also great.. whenever I had a question, they were quick to help.”
-Diana
So, sure, if you're trying to make eco-friendly wedding choices, you could attempt to send your invites and save-the-dates via email to your guests. But you'll run into issues with spam folders, following up with guests to make sure they received (and don't delete) your invites, and trying to track down RSVPs, meal choices, and more all manually via email or phone. But that sounds absolutely terrible to me.
With Greenvelope, not only can your invitations look and feel super similar to a beautiful printed invite, but you get it all with the tools you need to keep everything organized and efficient. It's a win-win for you and the Earth. Go see what your design options are or upload your own design to Greenvelope and then let us know what you picked!
About the Author: Catherine Clark
Catherine Clark loiters at her local library, makes art, watches movies en masse, plays video and tabletop games, poorly cooks healthy things, cuddles with her feline fur babies, and blogs at BijouxandBits.com.
A digital invite is such a good idea but I so love receiving paper invites in the post. Exciting snail mail for the win!