By Rachel Torres

Rachel Torres is no stranger to tech startups. She leads web and content marketing over at Lookout, Inc. maker of the popular Lookout Mobile Security Android antivirus app. When she and her fiance, Samo got engaged, they turned to Wufoo and other great web services to save time and money in wedding planning.

Welcome, Rachel!

Here comes the bride

You know what I love about wedding planning? Nothing!

I kid, I kid. When Samo and I got engaged, we agreed we wanted to spend money on the things that would make our day great for a guests: food, booze, an awesome DJ, and a wedding planner to make it all run smoothly. (Big shoutout to DJ Morgan and Caitlin Arnold Events.)

Neither of us cared much about invitations beyond making it really easy to manage our guests’ RSVPs.

Wufoo, Squarespace and MailChimp to the rescue

We decided to do online-only invitations, no paper. There’s a ton of crappy, badly designed, wedding-specific website and online invitation services, but I knew I could do better putting together best-in-class website, email and form services on my own. I knew about Wufoo because my company—Lookout—had used Wufoo for customer surveys. We were using SquareSpace for our wedding website because they had the cleanest designs and the best mobile responsive templates of other website builder options. (It would’ve hurt my heart as a Silicon Valley, web-ified, startup snob to use something ugly or desktop-only.) Also, MailChimp is just an all out fun brand with great free email campaign options.

First, I created our wedding website with SquareSpace. It was super easy to then create and embed a Wufoo form in SquareSpace to gather our guest RSVPs. There were easy directions from both companies. Then I created a decent-enough, simple (and mobile ready!) email message using MailChimp to send to all of our wedding guests.

The call to action in the email clicked through to the Wufoo-powered RSVP page on our site.

I created a rule to receive email notifications when people responded to our wedding Wufoo form. It was awesome to see them roll in. Wufoo also made it really easy to download a CSV to track all the guest responses. We also asked people to leave their mailing address in the RSVP form, so now we also have a clean, easy file of all our friends’ and family’s contact info for sending thank you notes and ugly Christmas sweater cards in the future.

I shudder when I think about all the work we would have had to do with paper invites. Tracking down everyone’s mailing address, addressing all those envelopes, gathering the reply cards and then tracking the responses—ouch. Plus, that letterpress shizz is expensive and I wanted to spend the money on mini crab-cakes at the wedding!

Online invites aren’t for everyone. We were lucky that we only had two guests who were not internet-savvy enough to deal with email and online invitations. So for all you brides and grooms out there looking to save money (not to mention trees)—I recommend going with Wufoo for beautifully designed, easy-to-use forms for your invites and RSVP needs.

Gearing up for a wedding of your own? Congrats in advance and if you want to be wedding invitation rockstars like Rachel and Samo then be sure to check out our Wedding Invitation templates!