Birthday Email Automation

Learn How to Automate Birthday Emails in Omnisend

Paulius avatar
Written by Paulius
Updated over a week ago

If you collect information about the date of birth of your clients and subscribers, you can wish them a 'Happy Birthday with Omnisend's Birthday Email. It automatically sends a message on their special day. Perfect for developing customer relationships and making sales.

Show that you care about your clients and subscribers. These emails are fully automated, so you don't have to care about delivery - Omnisend handles it for you.

Contents

Before you begin

How to collect birthday dates?

Birthday Emails will only be sent to those subscribers whose birthday data is available to us. It can be imported from your store, or you can collect it with the help of our Signup Forms. Add an additional input field for the birth date; all new subscribers will have to enter this info.

As for your existing subscribers, you can create a Landing Page with the additional birthday field and send the link via a Campaign. Also, you can use the preference management page to ask your customers to provide birth dates.

Automation setup

To create the Birthday workflow, proceed to the Automations tab β†’ click on the Create workflow button and pick one of the suggestions for the Birthday automation.

Automation trigger settings

To trigger this automation, you must add a birthday date to your customers' profiles. To add any date field to the system, it should have the following format: YYYY-MM-DD; however, if you add your customers' birthday dates as a custom property, you won't be able to use it for the Birthday trigger. The only solution is to export your contacts list and upload it with proper mapping.

The default trigger in the automation is set to your customer's birthday date. However, you may also trigger this automation before or after the actual date.

Audience filter

You may also target your automation based on your customers' Profile data (Country, Gender, Tag, etc.) and their belonging to a specific Segment. Birthday email is very personal, and you may make it even more engaging by tailoring its content based on your customer profile data or his interests.

You can learn more about the Audience filter.

Exit conditions

Birthday automation doesn't have the default exit condition, meaning that the customer exits after getting all messages from the sequence. Nevertheless, you may also cancel the workflow under certain conditions.

You can learn more about Exit conditions.

Frequency

If you choose to avoid triggering the workflow for contacts who have already been in this automation, the same customer will only be able to trigger this sequence within a specific time. It makes sense if you want to send a different email for every birthday.
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Conditional Split

Even though you can target your emails with the Audience filter, it might be better to design one Birthday email with different email message variants based on your customer's profile data, purchase behavior, and engagement with your emails.

Delay

The default automation has the delay block set to a specific time of the day. It is not a great decision to disturb your customers too early in the morning.

Content of the message

In the Birthday automation, you may add messages, including Email, SMS, and Push notifications. For example, you could send an Email message one day before your customer birthday and an SMS reminder on that day.

Regarding the content of the Email message, it is perfect timing for some interactive blocks, such as the Discount Content block.

Testing Birthday Automation

When testing Birthday automation, you should add a date at least two days before the one when the message should be delivered because the message is triggered one day before the actual date.

For example, the email message for the subscriber whose birthday is 10.05.2020 should be triggered on 9.05.2020 at 0:00. If you provide the date 12.05.2020, the email will be triggered on 11.05.2020 at 0:00.

FAQ

Why do I have a lot of exits if no emails were sent and I don't have exit conditions? Contacts enter the workflow if they are subscribed to at least one of the channels (Email, SMS, Push notifications). That's why if you have only emails in the workflow, the contact subscribed to the SMS channel will only enter the workflow. However, as there are no SMS messages in your automation, customers will skip the first step and exit the workflow.

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