How do you send One Billion Calendar Invites with AWS SES?

Why not send 1 Billion Calendar Invites?

The Simple Invite Service (SIS) is a set of APIs that assemble calendar invites in AWS and hand them off to AWS Simple Email Service (SES) for Calendar Invite sending and RSVP tracking.

It’s a whole new channel category for digital marketing on AWS SES.

For this blog post, we review how we built a VIPLST application with the SIS APIs to visualize the calendar invite-sending scenarios on SES.

We create a calendar invite, send it to an email address box in AWS, and store it in S3.

The calendar invite data is harvested for transport on SES using an automation routine we built on Lambda.

We support injecting millions of calendar invites into S3 to store and forward the calendar messages as needed into SES sending.

In addition, we can create calendar invite messages inside AWS with our automation process using voice prompting to convert calendar invites for SES workflows.

In this demo, the customer logs into a VIP LIST dashboard to select which event they want to send calendar invites to from the customer email list they upload.

We track the RSVPs and provide updates to anyone who has received the calendar invite as part of the messaging workflow in the APIs.

If you want an API key to send calendar invites from your AWS SES account, email our trusty robot at zack@techvader.com.

Calendarsnack is using all out the technology we developed

I won’t get into the gory details.

Lets just say we can scale in AWS on SES.

You check out our stack here as well with our consumer sample platter here — https://calendarsnack.com/.

The VIPlst product is built to send a calendar invite instead of a email reminder

In this example the use case is for registration emails to a Webinar.

Instead of sending an email to remind customer’s to attend the event, we enable a single calendar invite to be sent, updated, and tracked using the app built with AWS using a email list uploader.

Step 1 was trying to figure out how to build a client to get the data into the “AWS”

We “eat the calendar data” off your calendar invite when sent it to us at create@calendarsnack.com. That starts the automation process.

We take that data and display it in the dashboard so you can select which event you want to attach your VIP LIST of names to send a calendar invite.

Once the calendar invite is sent to the list by SES, we track the RSVP data and update it each time it’s changed in the SIS dashboard and to any customers that have received the calendar invite from SES.

Use create@calendarsnack.com to get the event to your dashboard

The VIP dashboard is your command center for sending calendar invites to your VIP Lists and tracking the RSVP receipts.

We provide a messaging layer for update as part of the API stack

You can change any created event details in the calendar client you sent to the calendarsnack service. When you save those changes in your calendar client, they will flow to the SIS APIS to the Dashboard and anyone who has received the calendar invite already.

The SIS APIs provide a steady state to the service and act as a messaging layer in and out of AWS in this use case.

Prep is easy using a TXT File for Uploading

VIPlst Prep

Save the file as. TXT extension and use commas between the emails. Click the Choose File and Upload. The loader will automatically parse your list for you. You can also use the save as a . CSV option for a more extensive list.

Independently, the workflow would accommodate a data feed from SQS and SNS notification from AWS PinPoint to send the calendar invites from your AWS journey maps for current SES automation workflows.

This is the step from the List upload to picking your event

All your events in the future will end up on the picker list.

Once you upload the list, you can select the one event to send calendar invites to.

This example is for 500 calendar invites in a batch file to SIS and onto SES

This Dashboard has 60+ Events to send Calendar Invites to a list

The List Picker emulates the dashboard to select the event

3 steps to getting a VIP List sent

This part of the application highlights the power of putting events onto the Dashboard using your Calendar Client, then uploading your list and sending the batch of calendar invites for your webinar registrations in 2 minutes.

You can send updates if you wish along the way directly to your customers calendar.

Imagine this in an automation routine in AWS PinPoint to send calendar invites as an alternative channel to millions of email reminders?

SIS Workflow

The Simple Invite Service is built as a group of API’s

The SIS APIs use your Email List to create a connection layer for sending and tracking actual calendar invites for RSVPs across your campaigns sent through the AWS Simple Email Service.

Workflow for Update or Cancel

Think of SIS as steady state messaging system inside AWS as a virtual calendar server, updating and collecting RSVP’s for the Simple Email Service.

How we collect the data and display it

We collect and analyze for the individual user event data and the domain data for all users in that domain

Reporting is inside the S3 bucket and is visualized here into detailed workflows using the VUE3.JS application we built.

The detailed data is sent when a the Invitee Report is requested.

This service pulls the stored RSVP data from S3 for each calendar invite and can scale to millions for RSVP Analytics using AWS Athena and AWS QuickSight.

Detailed Calendar Invite reporting in each of the provisioned accounts

We are working on taking the AWS SIS APIs to other messaging platforms, such as MailChimp, Klaviyo, and Send Grid, using a concept we have developed that would allow the virtual calendar server to work with any SMTP provider.

Please reach out if you have any questions to me at greg@techvader.com or my robot son zack@techvader.com.

How do I send a Billion Calendar Invites to a VIP List.pdf