Wedding Planning and Online Marketing Nerdery

Most of our wedding planning and preparation up to this point has been full of nerd stuff, and it’s only gotten worse.

A few months ago when we were designing our wedding invitations, as with any couple planning a wedding, we were looking at areas where we could save money. The RSVP instantly came to mind. The cost of another insert card, envelope extra postage because of the weight and postage for the RSVP card adds up quickly.

In an effort to work around that, we jumped on the green RSVP trend that has been going on for the past few years – online RSVP forms.

This was a beautiful thing for many reasons.

1. Using an online form service allowed us to customize our RSVP and get all the information we needed, guest names, if they were coming, and if yes, their dinner options.
2. We won’t be getting a ton of mail that has to be opened, read, recorded and stored.
3. Since the  data is in digital form, and can easily be imported into Google Docs where 85% of our planning has taken place.
4. There’s no margin of error on our part. With paper RSVPs, we might accidentally mark you a “yes” for fish, when you wanted the beef. If there is something wrong, it’s your fault. (Sucker!)
5. It reduced the cost of our wedding invitations by about 10-15%.

Another major plus to doing an online RSVP was that we could send the guest to a specific thank you page based on how they answered. For our non-marketing friends out there, when a visitor to a website fills out an online form, you can send them to a different page once they click “submit”. On this thank you page, you can do a lot of different things, like offer a white-paper download, invite them to watch a webinar, whatever.

Since over half of our guests are coming in from out of town we decided that our thank you pages needed to have hotel information on them and driving directions to the venues for the in-town guests.

But that created a problem. We didn’t want to send someone to a page with hotel information and directions if they weren’t coming (the jerks), so what to do?

Enter Jotform, an easy to use (and free) web form creator. I use it quite often at work and it was the perfect solution for us because the forms have conditional functions. If a person RSVP’s yes, they go to a thank you page with the hotel information and directions. If they answer no, they are sent to a thank you page saying we’re sorry that they can’t come, and a link to the blog to stay informed and to see pictures of the events leading up to the wedding and beyond.

How about another monkey wrench into the RSVP flow? We’re having a second reception in New Jersey for friends and family who couldn’t make it to Houston for the ceremony. And some friends and family were invited to both events, so that is a lot more thank you pages than just a yes or no. We had to create a diagram to make sure that we hit all the possibilities.

As you can see there are eight different outcomes. Since things were getting really out of hand with the amount of pages that we would need, we decided to scale back where we could. We treated any “no” response as the same “no”. We’re very sorry you couldn’t share the day with us, but please keep checking back.

The “yes” responses were different. The Yes to Houston and Yes to New Jersey went to a unique page for each location. A Yes Houston/New Jersey went to a page with the same information as the yes to Houston and yes to New Jersey. A yes/no or no/yes went to the affirmative RSVP for the respective location.

We made this incredibly difficult and nerdy because that’s just who we are. We had the knowledge and tools available. It started with saving links and ideas to services like Google Docs Spreadsheets, Delicious and Evernote, to our Save the Date video that we emailed out using the email marketing service Constant Contact and it hasn’t ended yet.