Do you organize webinars or online training sessions? Want to promote your business and share your knowledge with the world? Your dream is, then, to build a loyal community of followers who regularly attend your events. To achieve this, you need to keep your recipients informed and updated with your events so that they can plan their schedules and follow them.
Read our latest blog post to discover how a calendar subscription can help boost attendance, nurture leads, and grow a loyal audience. Don't let your hard work go unnoticed – make it easy for your participants to remember and attend your next big webinar!
Imagine this: You've carefully planned your webinar content and crafted compelling presentations. You’ve poured hours into promoting your event – sending out emails, notifications, and producing social media posts. Despite all this effort, attendance numbers aren't hitting the target. Why? Because life happens. Your audience, just like you, juggles multiple responsibilities and commitments. They might sign up for your webinar with the best intentions but then forget to attend. Read more about attendance rates here.
Here's where calendar subscriptions come to the rescue. Not everyone is diligent enough to manually add events to their calendars. In the chaos of daily life, it's easy to lose track of even the most important plans. Moreover, let's be honest - people receive so many email invitations to online events and so many reminders that are seldom able to follow all of this! Recent statistics show that the email open rate is around 10%. You must admit: these numbers are not optimistic!
By using the Calendar subscription option, you allow your attendees to stay updated and always be well informed about future events. This will help you build a loyal base of customers eager to follow your future offers.
What is Calendar Subscription?
Calendar Subscription is a useful feature that allows participants of your webinars to stay updated with the events you organize. By sharing a link to your event calendar, your participants can easily subscribe, and their calendars will automatically update with your events.
The key term here is 'subscribe'. Probably you’ve seen the 'add to calendar' button on various websites and apps. But this is something totally different than the subscription we’re talking about. It just means adding a static event to your calendar. It will be displayed once and it refers to a particular date. It is just like adding manually to a calendar a single event, and once this event is over, there is no other update automatically introduced.
This is NOT what we mean by “subscribing” to a calendar.
A subscription, on the other hand, keeps you updated. When you subscribe, any changes to the event are automatically reflected in your calendar, ensuring you always have the latest information.
Understanding Calendar Subscription
This tool ensures that your participants stay informed about all your events effortlessly. Just share a link to your event calendar so your audience can easily subscribe. Their personal calendars will then automatically update with all your upcoming webinars, eliminating the need for manual entries and ensuring no one misses out.
Sounds good? Indeed, this option gives vast possibilities: No more manual entries, no more forgotten dates – just seamless synchronization that ensures your hard work gets the attention it deserves.
Calendar subscriptions are also an excellent way to stay informed about holidays, sports events, social media updates, and more. The effect is that you can access all of your subscribed calendars seamlessly across all your devices.
Why use Calendar Subscription?
There are 3 simple reasons:
- It is one of the easiest ways to ensure your customers know when your events are.
- By comparing multiple calendars, you can more easily make commitments and plan your schedule.
- If your customers know when your events are, they are way more likely to attend.
Benefits of using Calendar Subscription
#1. Automatic updates
One of the most significant advantages of calendar subscriptions is the ability to push automatic updates. If there are any changes to your webinar – whether it's the timing, the link for joining, or additional resources – subscribers will receive these updates instantly. This way everyone has the most current information without the need to read or send multiple emails.
#2. Convenience and the ease of use
Consider the current process for viewing your events on your website. Your customers have to open their browser, navigate to your site, click through the menu, and find the event details.
Once they find your events, they have to remember the dates and times, hoping they don't forget. This method is far from efficient and often fails.
With calendar subscriptions, all event information, including dates, times, and joining links, will automatically appear in the preferred calendar app. This can help reduce errors and miscommunication.
#3. Easy way to generate and nurture leads
Calendar subscriptions can also be an excellent tool for lead nurturing. By having potential clients and attendees subscribe to your calendar, you create a direct and ongoing line of communication. Future webinars, updates, and even promotions can be effortlessly communicated, keeping your audience engaged with your brand over the long term.
#4. Managing global timezones
For webinars with a global audience, managing different time zones can be a logistical nightmare. Calendar subscriptions handle this elegantly by automatically adjusting the event times to match the subscriber’s local time zone. As a result, there is no confusion about when to join.
#5. Increased attendance
Participants are more likely to attend a webinar if it’s integrated into their personal calendars. Calendar subscriptions act as a constant reminder, reducing the chances that your event will be forgotten or overlooked amidst other commitments.
How to make a calendar subscription for your events?
Of course, computers and phones often have built-in calendars that you can use. There are also outside apps that offer many more features that make it easier to manage tasks as well as stay connected and in tune with your events. However, the best option is to choose a webinar platform that has a Calendar Subscription feature built-in into the tool. This way you can be sure everything goes smoothly, you save time and optimize your workflows.
Calendar Subscription at LiveWebinar
LiveWebinar is an advanced webinar platform that offers Event Calendar Subscription option seamlessly built into the tool. This means that you don’t have to use any other additional apps to synchronize your calendars.
All you need to do is generate a link and then share it with your participants. As a result, they can easily subscribe, and their calendars will automatically update with your events.
Just send your recipients the link with a message of this meaning:
"Hello, we enclose a link to share with you. If you want to stay updated about our future events, this will help you achieve this. All you need to do is implement it into your calendar app."
You can also choose which events should be included in the subscription. There may be some that you do not wish to make public or visible to all your clients. The functionality lets you decide whch events are included and which are not.
The subscription process looks a bit different depending on the type of calendar you want to synchronize with (e.g. iCalendar Feed Using Apple’s iCal Program, Outlook, Google Calendar), but the general rules are the same: you produce the link and paste it into the proper place in the calendar app that you want to synchronize. Read more about the process here.
Thanks to this one simple trick, you can build a loyal community of attendees who will always know when to register and what events to take part in. Want to see what other possibilities LiveWebinar gives you? Sign up for free, choose your plan and discover new, fascinating options that will help your audience grow!