Key Takeaways
- Adding an “Add to Calendar” link increases event attendance by allowing subscribers to save event details with a single click, reducing friction and maximizing engagement.
- Different calendar platforms require different integration methods, with ICS files being universally accepted and direct calendar links offering a seamless experience for Gmail, Outlook.com, and Office 365 users.
- Personalized calendar links improve the user experience, ensuring subscribers can effortlessly add events to the correct calendar based on their email client, leading to higher participation and conversions.
- Litmus Personalize simplifies the process, enabling marketers to create branded “Add to Calendar” links in just a few clicks, enhancing automation and efficiency in event-driven email campaigns.
In-person or virtual events revolve around getting to know other people and learning from one another. Because email is such a personal channel, it’s the ideal medium to build excitement for events and send those all important event reminders.
This is your opportunity to make it easy for your email subscribers to add important events, promotions, webinars, appointments, that flash sale on their favorite shoes– whatever key moments you can think of– to their own calendar straight from your email with personalized email templates.
There are multiple ways to add a calendar link to your emails. By far the easiest way is with Add-to-Calendar in Litmus Personalize, which allows you to create custom calendar links in just a few clicks so subscribers can take action directly from your email. But if you don’t have Litmus, fear not. Below we’ll walk you through the entire email add-to-calendar process step-by-step.
Why You Should Use Calendar Links in Email Campaigns
To ensure that guests actually show up, include an “Add to Calendar” link in your event emails. With that, subscribers can add your events to their own calendars, helping them avoid calendar conflicts and allowing them to set up their own reminders. And maximizing the chance of them attending your event.
Traditionally, this is done with an ICS file—also known as iCalendar. This is a common calendar format that typically uses the .ics file extension and is widely accepted by most calendars. Not to be confused with Apple’s iCal, which shares a similar name, although iCalendar files do work there as well. For clarity, we’ll refer to this as an ICS or calendar file throughout this blog post.
Some calendars can also add events from web links—what we’ll refer to as calendar links. Taking the extra time to dynamically show the “Add to Calendar” link that matches each subscriber’s specific email client can make it easier and faster for your subscribers to add your event to their calendar.
We’ll walk you through which calendars you should care about, creating the actual calendar files and links, and coding these files and links into your event email for the best subscriber experience.
Step 1: Choose which calendars to target
There are countless different calendar applications available: ones available by default through your computer or mobile phone’s operating system, as part of your webmail, or another calendar application you’ve downloaded. It’s virtually impossible to support all the calendar applications out there.
To help you understand which calendar tools to focus on, take a look at your Email Analytics data. If you’re in the middle of an