Adding Calendar Invites to Emails

Overview

Marketers promote events, sales, and webinars by emailing users. Adding calendar invites to such emails would help users add the event to their calendars, increasing the campaign's effectiveness.

When you send an invite using a calendar app, it gets added to the recipient's calendar directly. However, when you send a bulk communication, as in the case of a campaign, the invites do not get added to the users' calendars directly. Thus, adding an option to add the invite to the user's calendar is beneficial. You can create calendar links or use an ICS file to send a calendar invite.

Creating a Calendar Invite

You can create calendar invites using the following and add them to the email template in MoEngage:

- - creating a calendar link
  - creating an invite using a .ics file

We recommend using both methods and adding the invite to the email, as some calendar apps do not support calendar links. Here is a list of the calendar types that support calendar links and ics files.

Calendar Type	ICS Calendar File	Calendar Link
AOL	✓	X
Apple Calendar	✓	X
Google Calendar	✓	✓
Office 365	✓	✓
Outlook	✓	X
Outlook.com	✓	✓
Yahoo	✓	✓

The steps to create a link invite using the Google Calendar app are described below.

Prerequisites

The invite should be created on a public calendar. For more information, refer to Create a public calendar.

Steps to create a link invite

Navigate to the Calendar app.
Click +Create in the top left corner.
Choose Event from the dropdown.
After specifying the date, time, frequency, links, description, and notes, click Save.
The event is now saved in your calendar. Click on the saved event in your calendar.
Click Edit event.
In the More actions dropdown, click Publish event. This will take you to the publish event screen, where the HTML code for adding the invite to the event will be displayed.
Copy and add the HTML code to your campaign, as described below.

Alternatively, you can create links for various calendar apps, such as Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, and Yahoo! Calendar using various online tools (such as Labnol).

Add Link to Email Campaign

Create an email campaign with the desired campaign name, target audience, and control group.
In the second step, where the email template is defined, add the link to the calendar invite as described below for the drag-and-drop editor:
1. 1. Add an icon for the invite link to the email template. In our example, the icon is named ADD TO CALENDAR. For more information, refer to Adding Icons to the Email Template.
  2. Click on the icon, and in the content pane to the right of the Drag and Drop editor, click on the More Options toggle for the icon.
  3. In the Link Type section, paste the copied link from the publish calendar screen in the Link URL section, as shown below.
In Step 3 of the campaign creation, add the information about the campaign's delivery schedule and configure the delivery controls.
Publish the campaign.
A preview of the invite received by the user in their inbox is shown at the begining of the article.

An ICS file is a calendar file that is saved in a universal calendar format that is used by several email and calendar programs, such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple Calendar. You can add an ICS file as an attachment to your Email.

Steps to create an ICS file

Use an online tool like iCalendar or iCal Event Maker to generate .ics files.

Add ICS File to Email Campaign

The ICS file needs to be uploaded to the email as an attachment, as described below:

Create an email campaign with the desired campaign name, target audience, and control group.
In the second step, where the email template and the sender details are added, navigate to the Attachments tab in the Email Details section.
Upload the ICS file using the Upload option, as shown below.
Add the file's path to the href element in the <a> tag.
Preview the email to ensure that it looks as desired.
In Step 3 of the campaign creation, add the information about the campaign's delivery schedule and configure the delivery controls.
Publish the campaign.
A preview of the invite received by the user in their inbox is shown at the beginning of the article.

Now that you've created a calendar invite and sent a campaign with it, head to Email Analytics and Info to see how your campaign is performing.