How to Automatically Send Personalized Thank You Notes After Your Wedding
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Planning a memorable wedding involves thoughtful details, like sending personalized thank you notes to your friends and family. While handwritten notes are manageable for small guest lists, they can become overwhelming for larger events. Couples and wedding coordinators are often left struggling to finish and send out the notes within 2-3 months after after the big day.
Fortunately, there are efficient ways to create personalized thank you cards without sacrificing quality or personal touch. This tutorial will show you how to auto-generate thank you notes that can be printed or digitally shared, saving you time and effort.
What You Will Create
Wedding thank you notes offer a heart-warming conclusion to the event, and they show appreciation to everyone who took the time to show support on the big day. There are several ways you can produce assets for this, whether you want to print them out or deliver them digitally—and we’ll discuss some options in this article.
The tools you’ll need to create thank you notes in bulk are:
- Airtable (optional): To store guest data and write customized notes
- Bannerbear : To generate graphics in bulk
By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to create thank you notes that look something like this:
Let’s get started!
How to Auto-generate Wedding Thank You Notes
A heartfelt note that shows appreciation to your wedding guests can be handwritten, but it can also be printed or digital. When planning your approach, consider:
- Level of customization : Do you want to write personalized messages for each guest? Use a general greeting? Apply a combination of both?
- Extent of automation : How much of the workflow can you automate? Will you only be producing notes or also printing or distributing them?
- Source of information : Where are your guests’ details found? Do you have a pre-existing source of information, or do you have to manually insert them for each guest?
Fortunately, you can customize an automated workflow like this to fit your own needs. And if you’ve decided to auto-generate thank you note graphics for printing or digital delivery, start with customizing a template on Bannerbear…
…or designing your own from scratch.
Once your design is ready, here are two methods you can use to start generating!
Method #1: Generate In Bulk Using Airtable
With Bannerbear's Airtable integration, you can easily generate thank you notes for wedding guests directly from a database. This means that if you’re already using Airtable for event planning, adding automatic note creation to the process doesn’t involve much more work.
Simply add a field for the message body, then fill it out with notes for your guests. You can use a long text field to write personal messages for each guest…
…use a formula to personalize the message following a template…
…or even use a combination of personal messages for your immediate wedding party and templated messages for everyone else.
If you’re using a combined approach, separating guests into personalized and templated message views can make it easy to generate in two different batches while maintaining a single, organized database.
Bear Tip 🐻: Adding a URL field for generated asset links will make it easier to locate them as needed.
When both your base and template are ready, all you have to do is integrate Airtable and Bannerbear, and start generating.
Connect your Airtable account to Bannerbear in account settings, using a personal access token.
Then, go to your Bannerbear template page, scroll down to the Integrations section and click the Airtable Settings button.
Insert your base ID, table ID, and view name.
Once you’ve saved and connected, you’ll be able to map fields to their corresponding template layers.
You can also choose whether you want to save links to a URL field.
Save and import your work. Your generated output should look something like this:
Bear Tip 🐻: Need to regenerate an asset? Use a checkbox field to track
Importedimages. Unchecking a record will trigger a new import, avoiding the need to redo the entire batch.
Method #2: Generate On-Demand Using Forms
Situations where you don’t have an existing database or want to create personalized notes for each guest might call for a different solution like Bannerbear’s Forms feature. This is great for generating as you go, but keep in mind that it’s harder to fit into a larger workflow automation.
Forms doesn’t require you to connect to any other app, which means setup is quick and easy. Once you’ve designed a template, all you have to do is scroll down to Integrations and click on the Forms Settings button.
Create a new form, then click to view it.
Bear Tip 🐻: Going to the Form’s settings will allow you to customize its name and appearance. You can also choose which layers to show and insert default text.
You’ll now be on a page where you can simply fill out the fields for each guest, then create an image.
Generated images can be saved in both PNG and JPG formats:
Repeat the process as many times as you want!
Bear Tip 🐻: Share the form with other users to get the job done faster!
Next Steps
The versatility of this automated task makes it easy to fit to your needs. Depending on your budget, guest list size, available tools, and desired level of personalization, you can tailor it further to:
- Create wedding invitations before the event
- Email thank you notes directly to guests after generation
- Address envelopes for easy mailing
- Print physical copies for distribution
- Include a link or QR code to the wedding photo album
- Generate a PDF file in addition to PNG and JPG
The process can be completely hands-off, or it can occur on-demand to reduce the manual work you have to do.
Customizing your thank you notes is a small detail, but one that will surely make your guests smile and fondly look back on the memories. But that doesn’t mean you have to stress over every detail. A beautifully written note can easily be put into a template you design, ensuring the personality and message stays intact.
