Marketo Tip: Linking Calendar Tokens in Your Emails Like a Pro

Have you ever tried to link a calendar token (.ics) file in an email only to hit a snag? While it may seem straightforward to add a calendar token file directly in an email, linking it as a URL can be a tad bit more challenging.

This is because a calendar token is an entire <a> tag itself; it’s not just an URL, and nesting <a> tags within each other isn’t valid in HTML. So, what's the solution then? In today's post, we'll discuss a hacky way to link a calendar token file as an URL in your emails using custom text tokens.

The idea is simple: to link the .ics file, you need a URL to it instead of the fully formed <a> tag, and to get the link-

1. Insert the calendar token into an email.

2. Open the email in Preview mode, and grab the calendar token’s URL.

3. Save the URL in a custom text token with the protocol (i.e., http:// or https://) removed from the front.

4. Add the custom text token as a link to the text/image with the protocol (http:// or https://) prefixed to it (without this, clicks on this link would not be tracked).

5. Alternatively, instead of storing the URL in a text token, you can directly link it in the text or image, but I’m a big token fan and prefer going via that route instead.

There you go with a short, sweet, handy tip for linking a calendar.ics file token to text or images in your email!

P.S. If you haven’t already, you should check out Sandy’s Agical.io solution for generating linkable ICS files.

Happy Marketo’ing!