It's probably pretty safe to assume that we've all been accosted before with the "Congratulations! You've won 250 free business cards from Vistaprint!" advertisement. It seems to come up every 10 minutes or so when I have Pandora radio playing in the background at work. Lately I've been tuning it out, or grumbling under my breath--that is until I found this brilliant bride's blog: A Bride's Guide to Vistaprint.
Jena, better known as the Vistaprint Goddess created a website with a few tricks she learned on how to maximize those free offers and discount codes in order to save big money for her invitations, save-the-date cards and other fun wedding swag.
Vistaprint
Vistaprint is a tricky site. When I was just getting into my photography business I jumped in with both feet and got my 250 free business cards...only to realize that free wasn't exactly the right word.
See, anytime you upload something like a logo or use something other than the free fonts, you get charged. So you might go crazy, only to realize that your "free" save-the-date cards are costing upwards of $40. Now I don't know about you, but it is one of my least favorite things in the world when I learn that "free" doesn't really mean free!
This is where the Vistaprint Goddess comes in! She has tips and tricks to help you make sure that free is free, or that you can score cheaper shipping even when you split an order up! She suggests signing up for their emails where you can find coupons and great discounts on things that you will find yourself needing for your wedding anyway. Here is a sample email she received: http://vistaprint-goddess.weebly.com/sample-email.html.
My suggestion is to create a couple of extra email accounts for offers like this, as some companies sell your information and you may find your spam folder filling up quickly. So it's probably better to use a secondary email account!
However, for the bride trying to stretch out a tight budget, or design her own invitations and related wedding correspondence, this could be a great tool.
Money-Saving Examples
Check out these examples from her blog:
♦ Do you need more than what's offered for free? Say you need 4 matching ladies' t shirts (bachelorette party?!). If you've got a good [coupon], one shirt will be 80% off = $2.66. But you want 4 shirts. To add 3 more shirts, your total jumps to $44.63, booooo. If you add slow shipping in, these 4 shirts are going to cost you $12.57 each. However, let's, instead, place four separate orders, all within the same hour (or the same night, same weekend, etc). Slow shipping for the 1 shirt is $4.41, making each shirt $7.07. I <3 saving money on something I would have purchased anyway!
♦ Want to make the 4 separate orders even cooler? Place 3 of the orders, paying for the slow shipping. The 4th order, pay for the 7 day shipping. It's cheaper for VP to print the other 3 early and ship them all in one box. So you pay for slow shipping for most, and get them all in 7 days :)
Pretty savvy in my opinion.
Now I'm mighty curious to know what kinds of interesting swag can be gotten for free or on the cheap from Vistaprint. The Goddess has a pretty impressive list on her site of the things that she was able to save money on, or get for free, with a bit of digital coupon clipping and customer smarts. I will never scoff at the free business cards offer again! See the pictures below for what she was able to do with those!
You can also check out more of her wedding items here. Most of them were free! Pretty impressive right? Hopefully now we've just been able to take a nice chunk of your wedding correspondence budget and put it towards something else, like the honeymoon!
Happy printing!
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Jen Kiaba is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Rhinebeck, NY with her superhero boyfriend, two crazy cats and an adorable (albeit very lazy) basset hound! She can also frequently be found on Facebook and Twitter!