ECAL has released ‘Personal Events’, an exciting new feature that delivers totally personalised events to the calendar of a user.

Facilitated by ECAL’s enterprise API, Personal Events allows a ‘one-to-one’ connection with the user’s personal calendar, to deliver ‘rich’ and sophisticated information, such as membership renewals, bill payment reminders, travel bookings, itineraries, appointments, and more.

Personal Events have the power to solve some pretty major issues right now.

For banking and payments, there is a widening cash flow gap. ECAL personalised payment reminders can help a user better manage payments, so suppliers are paid on-time. In fact, in a recent project with National Australia Bank (see Case Study), ECAL payment reminders worked to increase ‘on-time’ payments by up to 12% over SMS!

According to Xero it is reported that “62 percent of businesses would not survive more than three months if all invoices went unpaid”. Further, “at least half say being paid on time would reduce stress, avoid unnecessary debt and drive business growth”.

Xero also suggests that “reminder apps” will help with this growing problem. ECAL’s calendar reminders provide an even better solution, as the service integrates directly with the user’s personal calendar!

With ECAL’s ‘Personal Events’ feature, you can also change the status of a calendar entry. So, if a user’s payment schedule should change, or the amount owing change, or a payment has been received, or becomes overdue, these changes will update in the calendar. Pretty cool, hey.

For sport, the arts and other member-based organisations, renewals are a lifeblood. ‘Personal Events’ can reduce ‘churn’ by delivering specific and timely information about an upcoming membership renewal. Perfect for annual memberships, flexi packages or monthly direct debit notices.

Personal Events is limited only by the information you have, and with the support of the ECAL integration team, almost anything is possible.

If you’d like to find out more about ECAL’s ‘Personal Events’ feature, please contact us via email, or use the Live Chat feature on our website.

ECAL, the world’s leading calendar marketing solution, is proud to announce its partnership with the International Cricket Council (ICC), the governing body of cricket globally.

Cricket lovers throughout the world can now sync their favourite Men’s and Women’s fixtures straight to their personal calendar, so they know what’s on and when, wherever they are. With handy alerts and direct access to the ICC live Match Centre, Tickets, Latest News, Social Media and more, cricket fans will never miss a moment of the action.

For ECAL, this is yet another significant partnership with a major global sport. With an enormous audience, particularly within the Indian subcontinent, this partnership takes the ECAL service to millions of new users.

Big business, across many industries, are a perfect fit for the ECAL’s enterprise solution. With a need for high security, high levels of customisation, preferential API’s and in-depth data analysis, ECAL is the ‘go-to’ solution for enterprise business.

At ECAL, we’re pleased to announce the release of our Ultimate ‘next generation’ widget display, now live and available in your admin!

Designed for even greater customisation, more marketing power and smarter data insights, this widget comes with some pretty cool, game-changing features (note that all existing widgets will be auto upgraded shortly).

Here’s a few of our favourite things!

Category Selector

Filter schedules via categories. Users can browse through Schedules across different categories, via a simple ‘Browse” drop-down list.

Geo-detection

Uncover the location of your users, right down to post / zip code level!

Google & Outlook.com OAuth

Direct API connection to the ‘master’ calendar of users, plus fast, real-time updates and communications.

Returning User Recognition

Our system instantly recognises verified ECAL users (across clients), and their preferred calendar, for a very slick, ‘one-click’ subscription process.

CSS Styling

Override the look and feel of the standard widget options, by uploading custom CSS for a totally unique, on-brand design.

Facebook Pixel ID

Track ECAL conversions from your Facebook ad campaigns.

Social Sharing

Customise the social sharing message that appears for users following subscription, to increase viral spread.

Sports fans are interested in more than just your season schedule. Sure, that is the number one reason why fans will subscribe to your ‘digital calendar’, however you best not stop there!

The average sports client on the ECAL platform promotes around 5-6 ‘schedules’ of content, and that can offer a nice broad selection of content – including various game schedules, broadcast schedules, corporate events, community program events, and events for special interest groups (eg: Women’s networking, cheerleaders or coteries).

Additionally, as fans choose their schedule preferences, they effectively self-profile. This will help you develop a 360-degree view of the customer, and help fuel a more ‘dynamic CRM’ framework. It will ensure any further communications you send to a customer is tailored to meet their specific interests.

Leading sports brands like Tottenham Hotspur FC and Washington Redskins have as much as a dozen schedule choices, with good reason.

By offering a selection of great content, you allow your audience to keep up-to-date with events that specifically interest them – events they likely didn’t know existed in the first place. These top brands are also using content schedules to prompt sales interest, with schedules for ‘Ticket On-Sale Dates’ proving hugely effective.

To demonstrate the point, here below are the schedules offered by an ECAL football client, and the percentage of users who subscribe to each schedule. There are a total of 38,000 subscriptions in total at the time.

As you can see, 29% of users subscribe to ‘Bronze’ category ticket dates, 23% to ‘Member’ ticket dates and 28% to ‘General Public’ ticket dates. Additionally, 20% are interested in ‘Events & Offers’.

Now let’s look at exactly how these ticket on-sale dates stimulate click-throughs and purchase intent straight from the calendar.

You can see distinct ‘click-through’ peaks generated specifically by the ‘Bronze’ and ‘Member’ ticket on-sale entries appearing in the fans’ calendar.

These ticket on-sale date entries let fans know exactly when they can purchase tickets for upcoming games, with instant and direct access to purchase tickets via embedded links. Timely reminders are set beforehand, so the fan has time to consider and prepare to engage, and purchase.

As you can see, fans are interested in so much more than just the games! The calendar is a very powerful channel to stimulate buying intent for tickets, and for other high value sales like season tickets, merchandise / team gear, online video subscriptions, Christmas gift ideas and more.

It is often asked, around our office at least…”if it’s not in my calendar, does it even exist at all?” Indeed we hear the same sentiment from ECAL users time and time again.

So, the benefits of communicating to the calendar seem to make great sense, right? Avoid the inbox chaos, deliver your message to users, at the ‘right time’, in the ‘right place’. Makes total sense.

And we know that the modern consumer is increasingly mobile, they are always connected to the internet, they are forever “busy”…so “busy”, and managing life is hard enough!

So how does the modern consumer keep on top of it all? Exactly to what extent do they rely upon their ‘digital calendar’ to manage “life”. Exactly how many manage life via their personal digital calendar, compared to say, keeping a wall calendar, a diary or journal?

Well, we have the answers!

We surveyed 1,000 people (aged 18-64) in each of the US, UK and Australia. The sample was representative of the population.

The Question: What do you rely upon most to manage your daily schedule?

United States

United Kingdom

Australia

Some further insights reveal that:
* In UK, over 62% of 18-14 year-olds use their mobile calendar
* In Australia, 25-34 (59.5%) and 18-24 (57.7%) year-olds are most likely to use their mobile calendar
* In US, 63% of 55-64 year-olds use a digital calendar (mobile or desktop) rather than paper (37%)
* Women use paper diaries / journals / planners more than men

By Chris Smith, Forbes, June 10, 2016

Next week the Premier League will at long last unveil its 2016-17 league schedule. It’s a much-anticipated occasion, which is perhaps best highlighted by the number of rumored schedule leaks (and the flood of accompanying headlines) that have hit the internet in recent weeks. But what’s truly different this time around is that the English league will be putting a new twist on its schedule reveal: Thanks to a new partnership with ECAL, an interactive calendar marketing platform, fans will now be able to add the fixtures to their calendars with just a few clicks.

“We started to think about the personal calendar space as a new communications channel,” says ECAL founder and CEO Patrick Barrett, “and what we’ve found is it’s an incredibly effective method of communication.”

What does that mean for fans? ECAL’s technology will allow soccer fans to instantly sync the Premier League’s schedule with their personal calendars, no matter whether they use Outlook, Google GOOGL -1.27% or mobile calendars fromApple AAPL -1.06% and Android. In addition to adding game dates to their calendars, fans will also be able to schedule league events, important dates and even buy game tickets. Barrett notes that bypassing the inbox provides “100% delivery,” and the content is totally relevant – “the content choice is in the hands of the consumer.”

Though next week’s schedule reveal will mark the start of ECAL’s league partnership, it won’t be the company’s first step into English soccer. Last season Tottenham Hotspur partnered with the company, and that relationship offers a good idea of what Premier League fans will have in store. Go to the London team’s schedule page and you’ll find the option to sync to your calendar:

Clicking that button offers nine different schedules to add to your calendar, ranging from match days to ticket on-sale dates to even an “On This Day” option. Barrett notes that while game dates are obviously the most subscribed to, those other options are surprisingly popular. Last year ticket on-sale dates were subscribed to by 40% of users, while club events garnered around 30%.