How to send your invitation on WhatsApp

Whatever you send an invitation through, a large share of your guests will read it in a messaging app, because that is where the link ends up once one person forwards it to a family group.

That forwarding is the useful part and it is worth designing for. It is also where a badly prepared link falls apart.

Make the preview look like something#

When a link is pasted into a message, the app fetches a small card to show underneath it: a picture, a title and a line of description. That card is the first thing your guest sees, and for many of them it is the deciding factor in whether they tap.

A link with no card shows as a bare grey rectangle. A link with a good one shows your names on your own paper.

Two things to check before you send anything to anybody:

• Paste the link into a message to yourself and look at what appears. If it is grey, wait a minute and try again, since the app is fetching it for the first time.
• Check it on both a phone and a computer, because they crop the picture differently.

What to write above the link#

Short. The invitation does the work, and a long message competes with it.

We are getting married. Everything is here, and there is a reply form at the bottom of it.

Our invitation, properly. Have a look when you get a minute, and let us know by the first of August.

One thing to include and one to leave out. Include the reply deadline, because it is the only instruction in the message. Leave out the venue and the time, because repeating them tells the reader they do not need to open the link.

Send it individually where you can#

A broadcast to sixty contacts arrives looking like a broadcast. Where it matters, paste it into the individual chat with one line of your own on top. It takes an evening and it roughly doubles the reply rate compared to a group post.

For the rest, email is better than a group chat, because a group chat buries the invitation under twenty replies within an hour and nobody can find it again in June.

Why the link should be yours#

An invitation sent as a photograph of a card cannot be replied to, cannot be corrected, cannot be added to a calendar and cannot be read properly on a small screen. It also compresses, which is why so many forwarded invitations arrive slightly blurred.

A link keeps working. When the shuttle time changes in August, the message you sent in March is still correct, because it points at a page rather than carrying a copy of one. More on that in the guide to digital invitations.

What you can and cannot know#

You can know how many people opened the invitation, and that is genuinely useful for chasing. You cannot know who read a message in an inbox, and anybody claiming otherwise is guessing.

One quirk worth understanding: taps that arrive from a messaging app usually carry no information about where they came from, so most of them are counted simply as direct. That is not a fault in the counting, it is how messaging apps work.