What with how next week, Maddox turns 5, and the following week will mark the birthday of our 5th child, I have birthday stuff on the brain. This week’s Learnin’ Thursday is dedicated to some birthday best practice so that you can surprise, delight, and convert your subscribers by celebrating this key milestone!

First thing’s first:

You can’t send a birthday email if you don’t ask for the date of birth of your subscribers. You can record this in your point of sale system and sync to your email service provider. Or, create a custom field or merge tag in your email service provider and request birthday from your subscribers during their onboarding experience like my friends at Chubbies. You could even do a dedicated email to your subscribers asking for them to provide additional info (LIKE birthday, but also preference information and more). But if you aren’t asking for birthday already, you need to create a strategy for getting this information, and set up systems to ensure the information gets into your email platform in a usable format so that you can…

USE THAT BIRTHDAY INFO TO SEND A BIRTHDAY TRIGGERED EMAIL!

I’ve not been quiet here on the blog about birthday emails! Here is my birthday post from 2019, and the best triggered emails of 2018 (be sure to scroll to the end to see the best birthday email ever).

But to keep it fresh, here are some other ideas you should know about.

• Consider upping the ante for your birthday triggered message by updating it seasonally, to make it even more relevant and personal to the recipient. Once your triggered birthday email is set up, it isn’t a ton of extra work to go in every 90 days, or heck, every MONTH, and make a few tweaks to the creative and the language to make it even more wow-worthy.
• Send a birthday email BEFORE the big day, encouraging them to buy their new favorite [insert your product here] and have it delivered in time for the celebration. This is awesome if you sell clothing (buy your new outfit), consumables (pair our X, Y, Z with your cake!), even services (book your birthday massage today).
• Also, send a birthday email ON their birthday so that they know you gave a crap about the data and didn’t just BATCH send that sucker.
• Bear in mind, some people will give you a fake birthday. It’s cool. There are a lot of 101 year old wine drinkers in my clients’ systems born right on New Year’s Day. If you’re feeling frisky, put something in the p.s. “Not actually your birthday today? WE lie about our age all the time. You can give us the real details so that our future birthday greeting actually means something to you… “

So now what?

If you haven’t been capturing birthday info for your subscribers, you need to start by creating a strategy for getting this from your subscribers, then rolling that out to your team and to your business operations.

Then, create the birthday email. Use some of the posts I shared here for inspiration, or watch this Facebook LIVE where I give even more tips and ideas for triggered emails.

Once your birthday email is built, tested, and turned on, check in on it for a few days to make sure it is actually going out the way you want it to, and then…

Set a reminder for at least every 90 days to analyze and optimize that puppy, make seasonal tweaks, and see how it is performing to your goals. Make adjustments and repeat as necessary.

More birthday goodies

I love Michael Bolton.

How a kid’s birthday party and starting a business are similar (from the Work Hard, Mom Harder podcast)