How to send Mass Calendar Invites using Outlook

Looking to send Mass or Bulk Calendar Invites using Outlook?

Outlook is one of the most popular email application today and is used by millions of small and big businesses. 

It offers a user a ton of features and options to control how outgoing and incoming emails behave using filters and other options, and hence is picked by most users as their default email application. 

Moreover Outlook is no longer restricted to just Office365 emails as a service, you can configure and use outlook for any and almost all email service providers inclusing Gsuite and Gmail and hence its the preferred medium to send emails. 

The challenge now comes in when you try to use Outlook and are trying to send out a calendar invite to multiple recipients. 

Outlook offers a greate calendar application which is built-in to its core, however most calendar applications are geared to work at a 1:1 or 1:10 kind of invite ration, as the general assumption is that you will not be inviting more than 20-30 people to a meeting! 

So if you are thinking now how do I invite over 200-500+ people to a meeting, event, webinar or a conference and are using Outlook, and are stuck - we have a solution for you! 

Sending using Outlook

Quick Work Around -

You can add your invite list to "BCC" or simply select the option to "Hide invite list" as the simplest option and send out the calendar invites, you will need to create a list of email addresses first and have them ready in notepad separated by a semicolan (;), this way when you copy-paste your list, outlooks will recognize them as individual entries and send them invites. 

Next add all the details you wish to add to your invite and hit "send" and that's it! 

Challenges - 

This option while it's the simplest, poses a top of challenges - 

1. You cannot customize the message to each individual E.g. if you wish to share user id or password to a web meeting, this wont work, as everyone receives the same message.

2. You will face issues from your Email Service Provider - Most business email service providers are not geared to handle "mass emails", in the above method outlook will try to push out all invites in one-go via your email service, and this is "Mass Mailing" which your email service provider may not support and thus may lead to a temp ban on your emails or a permanent ban as well. 

3. SPAM Guidelines - Once again like we mentioned this method to a business email service provider looks like Mass Mailing and hence can trigger SPAM alerts on your account and domain thus damaging your domain reputation.

Sure you may do this as one-off activity and can get away with it, however if you are looking to do this regularly, you need a different approavh.

So what's the solution?

Introducing Let's Calendar! 

Let's face it, you are reading this because you googled "how to send bulk calendar invites using Outoook" and ended up on this article, and the answer to this question is - No, unfortunately there is no real way you can use Outlook and send out a calendar invite to lets say over 500+ recipients. The challenges are huge like we have already covered above. 

This is why we bult Let's Calendar! Let's Calendar is designed and built from the ground up to send mass calendar invites on your behalf to your recipients. It no longer matters if you are inviting 10 or 10,000 participants via the calendar invite option, you can use Let's Calendar to do so instantly! 

Let's Calendar uses your domain and your identity to send these invites, so your recipients will see your name in the senders details and not that of Let's Calendar.

So how to do this?

1. Head over to www.letscalendar.com and create your FREE ACCOUNT (We offer a free trial as well as a Forever Free Plan as well)

2. Link your favourite SMTP service or setup a new one (We recommend MailJet or SendGrid) and link the same

3. Add your Email Address

4. Create your Campaign (Or Meeting)

5. Upload your invite list

6. Test and Send! 

That's it, your first campaign is on it's way! 

Now that you have liked your SMTP and domain, next time onwards all you need to do is skip and start from step 4! 

It's that simple, so don't just take our word for it, we recommend you give Let's Calendar a try to believe us! 

If you need help you can always reachout to us on [email protected] and we will be happy to assist you!