Use an Image Instead of Text for the Calendar Token

Anonymous
Not applicable

When you create a calendar token and place it in your emails, it creates a text link like this:

pastedImage_1.png

Sometimes people want something a little bit showier so they try to make an image that links to the .ics file. This doesn’t work; Marketo will replace the image with the text. Instead, you get stuck with the workaround of creating a calendar file manually and uploading it to Images and Files so you can hyperlink to it directly. That works, but who wants to have to do all that extra work to create your own calendar file? Not me. (Secretly I’m very lazy. Or, as I prefer to call it, efficient.)

So here’s a little trick I discovered:

  • Create the calendar file as a local program token as you would normally.
  • In your email, add the image you want to hyperlink to the calendar file and hyperlink it to the calendar token. We know that this won't actually work correctly, but it will allow you to find the URL of the .ics file.
  • Send yourself a test email. When you get the test email, hover over the image and identify the URL of the .ics. In this screenshot, the URL is “pages.gladiatorapps.com/rs/384-evm-334/373/subject.ics”.
    pastedImage_0.png
  • Take this URL to your email and replace the hyperlink to your calendar token with the direct URL.
    pastedImage_3.png
  • Now send yourself another test email. This time, you’ll see your image, which will have a tracked hyperlink. When you click on that hyperlink, bam – calendar file!
    pastedImage_4.pngpastedImage_5.png

(Hopefully if you use this, you'll spend the time to create better names and images than I did for mine.)

1889
6
6 Comments
Jeff_Smith3
Level 7

Great blog entry. One question, though. This workaround allows us to find the URL of the .ics file, which we can then use to hyperlink. Do you know why Marketo doesn't simply show the URL to begin with? This would save us time. I feel like this used to be the case before a lot of updates occurred.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Honestly, it's been like that for as long as I can remember. I originally wrote this up more than a year ago after one of the consultants on our team asked if anyone could figure out how to make it work. I don't know why it's like that; I agree that it seems strange.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Honestly, it's been like that for as long as I can remember. I originally wrote this up more than a year ago after one of the consultants on our team asked if anyone could figure out how to make it work. I don't know why it's like that; I agree that it seems strange.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Cool workaround. Would you have to do the test email, get the link and replace in the image hyperlink for each webinar program you clone? I'm just thinking in terms of scalability and number of steps when cloning a webinar program.

Anonymous
Not applicable

I just tested it and yes, you have to readjust the URL when you clone. I can't quite figure out the numbering in the URL. It seems like it's incrementing by 4. In my test, the URL went from 373 to 377 and then to 381 with the next clone. So, I guess in theory you could test this out some more so that you could just edit that number manually each time you clone.

I were going to go with the approach of retesting the URL each time, I'd probably keep the test email in the template program so all I had to do was do a send sample.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Freaking Brilliant. Thank you!