How do you add an event to a calendar in html?

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 reminders.

To ensure that guests actually show up, it can be useful to include an “Add to Calendar” link in your event emails. With that, subscribers can add the events to their own calendars, making it easier to avoid calendar conflicts and allowing them to set up their own reminders.

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 your event more accessible to them. In other words, 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 email subscriber experience.

Table of Contents

1. Step 1: Choose which calendars to target
2. Step 2: Create the calendar links and files
   1. ICS calendar files
   2. Calendar links
3. Step 3: Code your Add to Calendar links into your email
   1. Decide how to display your Add to Calendar button
   2. Create your CTA buttons and links
   3. Target the right audience with the right calendar link
4. See these “Add to Calendar” links in action

Step 1: Choose which calendars to target

There are countless different calendar applications available: ones available by default through your computer’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.

Then, create the URLs for the other email client’s calendar links you plan on using and put them under the button you just created:

Finally, wrap the whole thing in a

     Add to your Calendar
     

          Outlook.com |
                       	 
          Office 365 |
                       	 
          Google
     

     Add to your Google Calendar
                       	 
     

          Outlook.com |
                       	 
          Office 365 |
                       	 
          Apple Mail/Outlook Desktop