How To Make Memorable Wedding Announcement

info

How To Make Your Wedding Announcement Memorable

You said, “I do,” and are now ready to share the great news of your wedding with the world. You’re so excited that you want to shout it from the mountain tops! You probably feel that posting a picture on social media doesn’t do your wedding justice. Instead, what you need are wedding announcements. Wedding announcement cards are a classy way to share your good news with those who couldn’t make your wedding.

Learn how to design and send gorgeous wedding announcement cards to celebrate your memorable day.

Key Takeaways:

Wedding announcements let those that couldn’t make it to your wedding know of the new marriage

Physical wedding announcements are more memorable than digital announcements and provide a keepsake of the day

Send out your wedding announcement the day after your wedding so recipients receive them within the week

Are Wedding Announcements Still a Thing?

When you hear “wedding announcements,” you might picture a formal announcement in the Sunday paper. While that image is outdated, the concept is still relevant. However, today there are other options for couples to share the good news.

There are several key cards to send out around your wedding, so it’s easy to get confused. To help understand how wedding announcements fit into your schedule, here’s a quick breakdown of each card and its purpose.

Save the Dates: Alerting wedding guests of the date and time of your upcoming event.
Invitations: A formal, detailed description of your wedding and what to expect
Wedding Announcements: A post-wedding announcement to everyone to let people know of your life change

Wedding announcements differ from save the dates and invites because they don’t go to guests and tell them about the wedding. Instead, they are announcements you send immediately after the wedding to let those that couldn’t make it or weren’t invited know about your new marriage.

Couples used to make wedding announcements by publishing them in the newspaper. While some can still do this, it isn’t quite as popular–especially since many people don’t read newspapers anymore. Wedding announcement cards are more popular today.

However, if you would like to submit your wedding announcement in a widely distributed publication in addition to sending cards, check out this video for how to get your announcement in the New York Times.

How Do You Write a Wedding Announcement?

A wedding announcement summarizes the event. Even if someone didn’t attend, the friend might still want to hear about the wedding. Here are a few details to include in a wedding announcement:

Your name (yes, you can use your married name!)
Parents’ names
Wedding details like the location and date
Additional information about the ceremony or each other
Letting the recipient know you missed them and the ceremony was small (so the recipient doesn’t feel slighted for not receiving an invite)

Who Receives a Wedding Announcement

Wedding announcements are for anyone who wasn’t at the wedding. You will want to send out wedding announcement cards to guests you invited but couldn’t make it. However, you can also send cards to people you didn’t invite but would appreciate hearing the news personally rather than finding out through social media or a third party.

Sending announcements to people you didn’t invite to the wedding isn’t considered rude. Friends often appreciate the thought. Most people understand that weddings don’t have unlimited space. You can show that you still care about those friends and are thinking of them by sending an announcement so they can still celebrate with you.

However, the exception would be if your wedding was a large event. For example, if you invited over 150 guests to your wedding, you would only send the announcement to guests you invited but couldn’t attend.

5 Tips to Make Your Wedding Announcements Memorable

Use these five tips to design and send memorable wedding announcements.

1. Give an Added Detail

Make your wedding announcement more personal and memorable by adding a unique detail about the wedding. For example, you might say, “We were married in an intimate wedding, surrounded by close friends, family, and budding hydrangeas.”

These details make the wedding come to life with more imagery and color.

2. Avoid Mentions of Gifts

Wedding announcements aren’t gift requests, so avoid mentions of your registry or implications that you expect a gift.

However, some recipients might want to give a gift. Especially guests you invited who weren’t able to attend. Most of the time, these recipients will reach out and ask where to send a gift or if you have a registry. That’s when you can share your registry information.

You might also share your wedding website, where recipients can view pictures of the ceremony. The website can also include your registry.

3. Use a Memorable Design

You just had a photographer take hundreds of pictures of your big day, so you may consider using one for your announcement. Unfortunately, if you used images from your wedding, you wouldn’t be able to design or send out the announcements until weeks after the ceremony. Most of your friends would have already heard your big news by that time, and you’d miss out on the surprise factor.

Instead of images, convey your love story through other unique design elements. For example, consider using beautiful letterpress printed cards for your wedding announcement, then provide a link to your wedding website where you can share images of the event when the photographer shares them with you. By skipping the image part of the announcement, you can print them before the wedding and send them soon after the event.

4. Use a Printed Card over Digital Announcements

Digital announcements are very popular because they are convenient to create and send. However, the downside of digital announcements is that they don’t make as great of an impression and don’t last as long. For example, when was the last time you printed out an email and kept it? Probably not recently because people don’t see emails as keepsakes.

A printed announcement is more memorable. The printed card will also provide a physical item you can save in your scrapbook or wedding album and look back on for years to come.

5. Immediately Send the Wedding Announcement

Wedding announcements traditionally appeared immediately after the event. That’s why the couple’s parents would submit the announcement to the papers three to six weeks before the event. Then, the announcement would appear in the Sunday morning paper after the ceremony.

Thankfully, wedding announcement cards are much simpler than newspaper announcements. However, you’ll still want to consider ordering the cards at least six weeks before the wedding. This schedule gives you time to select an appropriate design and wording. You also have time for the invitations to arrive and address the envelopes unless you order pre-addressed envelopes.

With all the excitement around the wedding day, you won’t want too many to-dos after you tie the knot, so you may even want to stamp the envelopes. If you have the announcement cards ready, you can drop them in the mail as soon as the ceremony is over (or ask your mom to drop them off so you can enjoy the wedding night). By sending the cards immediately, recipients will receive the cards within the week.