Open Forum

As someone versed in print media and AP Style, I'm starving to find a style guide for electronic invitations. 

I'm always thinking about these questions:

- What should be capitalized?
- How should an introductory paragraph sound (and how many words should it be?)
- What's the proper timing to send email invites?

Suggestions are welcome. Thank you!

#PromotingYourEvent

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Mark DeVaughn
Senior Communications Specialist
California State RetireesUnited States
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Hi Mark,

Hope you are well.

Could you please confirm are you referring to the eMarketing emails or the Event emails?

When you create an event email, you need to take care of the following :

- Do not overdo Capitalized words. Capitalized only the important words as less as possible.
- Maintain a good, balanced text-to-image ratio and avoid invisible content.
- Your email should not have a lot of formatting in it and don't build tables within cells within tables.
- Use a From Name that recipients will recognize, such as the name of your company or the CEO.
- Introductory paragraph should contain the information of what the email is about.
- The best time to send the Invitation email is when you have launched your event and are ready for the invitees to start registering for the event.

You can also refer to the articles :

How to Avoid the Spam Folder - Link: https://support.cvent.com/s/communityarticle/How-to-Avoid-the-Spam-Folder?searchFor=spam&lang=en_US
Creating an Event Email - Link: https://support.cvent.com/s/communityarticle/Creating-an-Event-Email?searchFor=email&lang=en_US

The first article contains the best practices you can use when creating an email.

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Raashi Semwal Khati
Senior Quality Analyst
Cvent
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Hi Mark - BizBash has some good guidelines for electronic invites.
7 Tips for Mastering Digital Invitation Etiquette | BizBash

I tend to include the following items in order:

• Who is invited
• What the event is about
• When the event is (Thursday, September 22)
• Where name of venue 
• Why they should attend
• How to respond

An important item that I also ALWAYS include is a way for people to easily decline the invitation. It's frustrating when you keep getting the same invite over and over with no way to let the sender know that you cannot attend. 

Best regards - Jenn

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Jennifer Jones
Senior Specialist
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Hi there! 
As someone who was responsible for QCing our resources as well as our comms, here are my two cents!

- What should be capitalized?
Your title/subject line other than and/the/or etc. 
- How should an introductory paragraph sound (and how many words should it be?)
We like to keep our intro paragraphs short, punchy, and high-level. Typically they are 3 sentences that cover off the who/what/where/when/why! 
- What's the proper timing to send email invites?
That depends on your audience, but we find that the sweet spot is around 11/11:30am because people are wrapping up to head off to lunch. We try to avoid morning emails as they can get lost in an inbox, and end of day - same thing. 

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Olivia Popofski
Marketing Coordinator
Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada and AffiliatesCanada
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I agree with Jennifer. We've whittled down our invite, and driven more people to the event landing page to hold all of our event information. As far as capitalization - event name/titles, location and dates. Otherwise we don't over capitalize. 

I also highly recommend having a decline option, even if it's a public invite - because it allows people to remove themselves for hearing about the event in the future.

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Beth Vriesen
Events Registration Admin
Associated Bank Corporation
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