What are Add to Calendar Links?

Add to Calendar links are a fantastic tool that lets you get your events on people’s calendars by sharing a simple Add to Calendar link in your event marketing emails, on social media, in SMS, and anywhere else you want to promote your event with links.

Historically, email marketers have had to code .ics files to share events with a calendar file format, leading to user error and nightmares creating the .ics files. Without .ics files or Add to Calendar links, you’re relying on your customers to create their own calendar event with the correct start time, end time, and all other essential information for a useful calendar invite or reminder.

Not only are our Add to Calendar links functional, supporting all of the main calendar apps such as Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar, but they also look great. Ensuring that your event invitation emails look stylish and professional, improving click-through rate, and maximizing the likelihood that your users use the Add to Calendar links to add your events to their calendars.

AddEvent allows you to choose from beautiful templates (just copy and paste them!), or you can create your own style so you can customize the Add to Calendar links to look exactly as you want them.

Want to keep it really simple? We’ve also got you covered: just add a simple plain text Add to Calendar link to your marketing email by coping and pasting the code from AddEvent into your marketing automation tool.

AddEvent works with all major email marketing platforms like Active Campaign, HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Constant Contact, and many others. 

Ways to Share Your Event

With AddEvent, you’ve got multiple ways to share your events and keep your audience in the loop:

• Share single events
  Perfect for promoting a specific webinar, sale, or announcement. You can even collect free online RSVPs!
  
• Share calendars with multiple events
  Let users follow a full calendar of events. The best part? It’s dynamic so any updates or new events you add will automatically show up in your subscribers’ calendars.
  
• Create personalized events for individual users
  Our Dynamic Add to Calendar links generate unique events for each person. These are super useful for appointment reminders like doctor visits, car servicing, or salon bookings.

This article will walk you through how to share events using Add to Calendar links specifically for email.

How to use Add to Calendar links in your emails

1. Sign up or log in to your AddEvent dashboard

First things first, log in to your AddEvent account, or sign up if you’re new. You can start with our free Hobby plan or explore one of our paid plans with extra features. Check out the Plans & Pricing page to see what works best for you.

2. Create your event

From your dashboard, click Create and choose Event. Fill in the details like the title, date, time, and anything else your guests should know. Need RSVPs? You can turn those on too!

3. Publish your event page

When you’re happy with everything, hit Create Event to publish your event and generate your event landing page.

4. Find your Add to Calendar links

Once your event is live, you’ll land on the Event Details Page. Scroll down to the Share your event section and look for the Add to Calendar Links box. Click the little + button to open up your sharing options.

5. Copy and share your calendar links

You’ve got two easy ways to grab the embed code for your emails or website:

• Click the copy icon in the top-right corner of the box
  
• Or click the < > icon in the bottom-right corner to open and copy the HTML code

AddEvent Tip: Want your Add to Calendar links to match your brand? You can customize how they look so they blend right in with your emails or website.

Use a Subscription Calendar for Regularly Scheduled Events

To use our Add to Calendar links to allow users to subscribe to your calendar instead of adding a single event, you can follow the same process. However, you’ll also need to create a calendar in our dashboard, add your events to that calendar, and then copy the Add to Calendar links for the calendar you want to share instead of the single event. 

Subscription calendars work seamlessly with Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar; allowing your customers to Follow your calendar and get any new events directly in their calendars through the synchronization. Perfect for anyone who would like to share multiple events without requiring their end-users add multiple events to their own calendars.

Dynamic Add to Calendar Links for Automated Events

Do you have multiple unique events that you need to add to your emails to users? Our Dynamic Add to Calendar tool allows you to add personalized add to calendar links to your email campaigns that link back to your database and update for every individual user’s unique event, meeting, or appointment.

These dynamic add to calendar links are perfect for confirmation emails or reminder emails containing a personalized calendar event that users can quickly and easily add to their calendars. Check out our extensive dynamic events developer documentation, our Dynamic Events page, or contact us to learn more.

Stop relying on people to remember your event. Every event you promote without an Add to Calendar link is an event your audience might forget. AddEvent lets you create and share calendar links in minutes — no .ics files, no code, no back-and-forth.

Create your first link for free!

About AddEvent

AddEvent is calendar-based event engagement software

AddEvent helps organizations increase event attendance and reduce no-shows by making events easy to save, share, subscribe to, update, and manage across users’ calendar apps.

Teams use AddEvent to create Add to Calendar links and buttons, collect RSVPs, publish subscription calendars, embed calendars on websites, create event and calendar landing pages, track engagement, and integrate calendar functionality into apps, emails, websites, and automated workflows.

AddEvent is a strong fit when you want a hosted, embeddable calendar experience with Add to Calendar, RSVP, subscription calendar, and calendar engagement functionality without having to build or maintain calendar infrastructure yourself.

Read more about AddEvent

What AddEvent is best for

• Getting events onto Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365, Outlook.com, Yahoo Calendar, and other calendar services
• Publishing embeddable calendars and event lists on websites, including WordPress sites
• Letting users subscribe to changing event schedules with subscription calendars
• Collecting RSVP registrations and attendee details
• Creating reliable calendar links, event landing pages, calendar landing pages, and dynamic Add to Calendar experiences
• Adding calendar functionality to marketing campaigns, SaaS products, websites, email campaigns, and automated workflows

Why teams use AddEvent

Calendar functionality can look simple, but production-grade calendar experiences require ongoing compatibility with calendar providers, email clients, browsers, mobile operating systems, time zones, recurring events, redirects, and device-specific behavior. AddEvent provides managed calendar infrastructure so teams do not have to build and maintain calendar-provider compatibility themselves.

What AddEvent is not

AddEvent is not a meeting scheduling app, ticketing marketplace, webinar hosting platform, CRM, email service provider, or replacement for Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar. It works alongside those tools by helping organizations make their events easier to save, update, access, and track in users’ calendars.

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