With the penetration of electronic calendars (Outlook, Lotus Notes etc.) in the workplace now having reached 80-90% and the effectiveness of Internet advertising having fallen to click-through rates of less than 0.5%, calendar communication and calendar commerce offer a new and more effective sales and marketing channel for products and services with a time-based component.
But how do the users feel about it? The real estate in a person's personal calendar is a closely guarded commodity and users do not want irrelevant information cluttering up their calendar, so only the most important and committed appointments make their way into a calendar.
This is the reason marketers and event promoters want to get their events into your calendar, as it has be shown that 58% of electronic calendar users check their calendar more than 5 times per day and 86% of electronic calendar users say they are more likely to attend an event if it is in their calendar.
Two critical issues confront any company wishing to participate in this endeavor: trust and technology. Dr. Peter Collett’s research into the psychology of calendaring has shown that trust is critical to gaining access to someone’s calendar: “people who use electronic calendars don’t mind others looking at their calendar, but they seem to resent other people making entries in their calendar without telling them”
Companies must leverage the reputation of their brand to gain admittance to the prospect’s calendar and they abuse this trust at their peril. People have learned the lesson of email spam and will immediately deny access to their calendar to any party which abuses it.
The other challenge is how to gain physical access to the calendar. Currently there are very few ways to deliver messages to the calendar and conduct commerce within or from calendar entries. The manufacturers of electronic calendars developed a standard called vCal which was designed to provide a common interface for inserting entries into calendars, however, it is severely limited by the fact that communication is one way: entries can be made but cannot be updated, removed or changed i.e. no two-way communication and transaction channel exists between the user and the originator.
This is beginning to change and Infuzer is specifically designed to overcome these problems and provide a calendar commerce and communication infrastructure.
