‘In-Calendar Marketing’ Launched

When I announced back in July that we were making our existing suite of calendar products available for FREE, there were many out there who wondered what we were up to (here, here, here and here to cite a few examples).

I mentioned in that post that were moving on to “in-calendar advertising business models”. I was being deliberately vague at that time, but the time is now to update on what we have been doing:

We’ve just launched a new product and service called Calgoo In-Calendar Marketing™. In-Calendar Marketing is the world’s first marketing concept that allows businesses to deliver targeted, opt-in marketing messages directly into the calendars of those that subscribe to their offers.

This screen cast explains how it works. You can consider In-Calendar Marketing as a similar and complementary service to email marketing, except the delivery is to electronic calendars. Compared to email, calendars are less cluttered and more “timely”.

In-Calendar Marketing works with virtually all desktop and online calendars without having to install anything. One key benefit of our approach is that the calendar “feeds” to which people subscribe don’t go directly into a person’s actual calendar that contains their personal events. The calendar feeds appear in a parallel calendar that the user can click on or off as they choose.

We believe strongly that the calendar is the medium in which time-based decisions and commitments are made. If your business has a strong brand with loyal customers, I am confident they will find value in receiving your promotions and events in a medium where they plan and schedule. I think In-Calendar Marketing will be particularly suited for businesses with distressed or perishable inventory. Think of hotel rooms, travel, conferences, golf tee times – anything that is in the category of “use it or lose it”. It will also be useful for businesses e.g. ski resorts, whose customers are passionate about being informed about events and promotions.

When we released our first calendaring product back in 2006, we called it “Calgoo First Draft”. It was a little tongue-in-cheek as we didn’t want to follow the herd and call the product a beta release. This time around, it is more like a new chapter with many more pages left to write. The first release of In-Calendar Marketing is fully functional and already has customers (click here to read a case study on one of our first customers, golf reservations provider TeeTimes.net).

I encourage you to tell me what you like, what you would like changed and, perhaps more importantly, share with others your ideas for using In-Calendar Marketing within your own business. We have provided some of our own ideas here.

I am looking forward to this next chapter of our company and the world of online marketing!!!