…our electronic save the dates: a virtual reality…

We sent our Save the Dates back in December, so I'm a little behind in blogging about them... but what else is new???

I originally talked about our decision to go green/cheap/digital with our STD's and invitations here. This is a decision I absolutely do not regret. The amount of money we saved and the waste we managed to avoid by making this choice was well worth the very few complaints we received from guests who felt confused or inconvenienced by our email delivery. More often, we heard rave reviews from fellow tech-savvy and/or environmentally conscious friends.

All that being said, let me point out that this option is not necessarily a good fit for every couple. There is some somewhat meticulous maintenance and follow-up to do in order to pull it off, but thanks to a post on Elizabeth Anne Designs Weddings, I found a great resource which made all of that work pretty easy. My fellow type-A personalities will appreciate this. {Hypothetically speaking, does one classify as type-A if they manage the entire process of planning a wedding in a 13 (and counting!) sheet Excel workbook complete with pivot tables, color coding, and complex formulas?} Anyway, back to my story. I used MailChimp, a free email marketing service (up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails per month), to send and track all of our STD's. This website is genius. First of all, these people are clever, from the branding down to the instructions, it's all very tongue-in-cheek. Makes you feel like you're talking to your socially-awkward, yet adorable, IT guy-friend. I was won over from the start. We had been collecting email addresses for a while, which I obviously kept track of in my trusty spreadsheet...uh, hypothetically, I mean, I could have. Importing the guest list was as simple as a little copy and paste action.

Once the list was set up, I created our "campaign" in which we basically just designed the email and pushed send. Simple as that. As soon as guests began opening and reading and clicking, MailChimp was reporting open statistics and bounces and all sorts of helpful things, which gave us the ability to make sure no one got left out.

So enough of the technical stuff. Here's what we did….

Inspired by the amazing invitation I'd found so long ago, I wrote up the story of me and DG from way back when in a short and sweet little format. Once again our generous and talented groomsman/graphic designer worked it out. (Click the image to see it up close.)

Then I created my email campaign in MailChimp which lead our guests to our wedding website, where the PDF of our Save the Date was hosted.

(Photos by Will Knowles)

We learned a couple lessons about the process along the way, which came in handy when we got ready to send out our invitations. If, by chance, you're considering sending your STD's or invitations via email and you'd like to know more, leave me a comment or shoot me an email and I'd be happy to answer questions or give you some tips. All in all, this worked out really well for us and saved a LOT of money. J

More on our website and invitations coming soon!