In this article I'll tell you how to create a recurring email campaign that automatically sends your subscribers an email on their birthday. This same technique can be used to send any email automatically on the anniversary of any date, not just a birthday, such as an annual reminder to renew a service subscription or membership.
Here is how it will work:
- We are going to add a custom field to your list to store our subscriber's birthdays
- Then we are going to add a segment to the list that will hold all the subscribers whose birthday is today. A segment is like a saved search within your list, so we will create a segment that searches for subscribers whose birthday is the current day.
- Then we will create a regular email campaign, we will send it to your birthday segment, and we will make it a recurring campaign that sends every day. This means that every day it will send to all the subscribers whose birthday is today.
Step 1: Creating the birthday date field
To get started you will first need to add a custom field to your list to store each subscribers birthday:
Go to Lists > click on the name of the list > click on Custom Fields and add a new Date field. You could label this field "Birthday" or whatever name makes sense to you.
Date fields store date values in the format YYYY-MM-DD. So the 23rd of November 1982 would be stored as 1982-11-23. If you are going to import your subscribers from a CSV file then you will need to make sure you have the birthdays saved in this format. If you need to convert the dates from a different format see this help topic on microsoft.com: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/format-a-date-the-way-you-want-8e10019e-d5d8-47a1-ba95-db95123d273e
You can import subscribers from Lists > click on the list name > click Subscribers > click Import.
Step 2: Creating the segment
Now we need to create a segment that will display subscribers whose birthday is the current day.
To create a segment go to Lists > click on the list name > click Segments > click Create New.
Give the segment a name that makes sense to you such as "Birthday today"
Now click the plus button for "Conditions that apply to your list custom fields" to add a search condition. For the Field choose your Birthday field. For the operator just leave set to "is". And set the Value to "[BIRTHDAY]". [BIRTHDAY] is a merge tag that will match the anniversary of a date in the format YYYY-DD-MM. There are a couple of other tags that you could use instead:
| [DATE] | This will be transformed into the current date in the format of Y-m-d (i.e: 2022-07-27). This matches the exact date unlike the [BIRTHDAY] tag which matches on every anniversary of a date. |
| [PAST_DAYS_X] | This will rewind the current date by X days and use that as a comparison date. For example [PAST_DAYS_5] would match dates 5 days into the past. |
| [FUTURE_DAYS_X] | This will forward the current date by X days and use that as a comparison date. For example [FUTURE_DAYS_5] would match dates 5 days into the future. |
| [BIRTHDAY] | This matches on every anniversary of a date, unlike the [DATE] field that would only match once on the exact date. |
| [BIRTHDAY_FUTURE_DAYS_X] | This will match X days into the future of the anniversary. For example [BIRTHDAY_FUTURE_DAYS_5] would match 5 days into the future of the anniversary. So this would send the email 5 days before their birthday. |
Click "Save changes"
To test that your segment works click the "Show matching subscribers" button. This button will only show after you have saved your segment. This should display any subscriber who's birthday is today. (or that matches the date of your tag if you used a different tag such as BIRHDAY_FUTURE_DAYS_X)
Step 3: Create the campaign
To create a campaign go to Campaigns > click Create New.
On the first step of the campaign make sure you select your List and your Birthday segment.
No go through all the steps and then on the final "Confirmation" step tick "Advanced recurring". Choose Every Day and choose the hour of the day you want it sent, such as 9am. Do not leave this set to "every hour"!
Now send your campaign, it will send automatically every day at the hour you selected.
