Automated Birthday Emails

Maria Rico · October 2012

Hello there! I have a question about Email Campaigns that we'd like to experiment with in our organization. We are looking into the best way of sending out monthly birthday "cards" or emails to our constituents. We want to collect their birthday months and perhaps send them a coupon or a photo or just a "Happy Birthday" email as a way to engage with them.

We know that we can easily add the month as a field in RE and in Convio. We also know that we can create a list by sorting constituents by month and create 12 separate email lists and just rebuild them everytime we need to send them out. My question is, is there a way that we can set these emails to just automatically send themselves every month? Would we have to manually send them?

I imagine this is a pretty standard email campaign so I'm wondering if anyone else out there has tried it. Thanks!

Brian Mucha · October 2012

If you were adding and populating a birth-month field to Cons records using the additional information fields, then you could build a QUERY based on that value. The query makes your group, and you can rebuild it as needed. Couple that with a monthly scheduled email and it's all done.

You can also query on the date-of-birth field itself, but I can't think of a way to address just the month part of that. (The only operations you get are is before XX, is after XX, and is between XX and YY.)

Our DoB data is pretty poor. (Unless a large chunk of our cons were actually all born on Jan 1, some-random-year.) It might back-fire a bit if you send on the wrong month and they don't recall giving you that fake data.

Sheetal Persaud · October 2012

Hi Maria - if you look up my posts I had a good thread with Kent Gillam on this and he explains how do it.

In summary you create a query with lots of fields in it that say (birthdate = 12 months before today, birthdate=24 months before today, birthdate = 36 months before today and so on).

This was the only way we could figure out how to do it, as the birthdate information contains year as well, so you need to account for this.

Once you have that query set up, use to create a daily rebuildable group. It will then populate daily with anyone who has a birthday that day. You can use this to send a daily recurring email.

I have this set up for a client at the moment and it's working pretty well. The hardest part is setting up the query as it takes a couple of hours. We get the highest open rates of all our emails for that client on this series and have had some nice feedback from donors so I certainly think that it is worth it.

Hope that helps!

Antonia Gavrilis 2 · January 2017

We are also trying to implement an autoimated birthday email each month, if you are still using this, anyway you can share a screenshot of your query? I presume to handle the year issue you have to go back quite far. ANy help is appreciated.

-Antonia

Sheetal Persaud:

Hi Maria - if you look up my posts I had a good thread with Kent Gillam on this and he explains how do it.

In summary you create a query with lots of fields in it that say (birthdate = 12 months before today, birthdate=24 months before today, birthdate = 36 months before today and so on).

This was the only way we could figure out how to do it, as the birthdate information contains year as well, so you need to account for this.

Once you have that query set up, use to create a daily rebuildable group. It will then populate daily with anyone who has a birthday that day. You can use this to send a daily recurring email.

I have this set up for a client at the moment and it's working pretty well. The hardest part is setting up the query as it takes a couple of hours. We get the highest open rates of all our emails for that client on this series and have had some nice feedback from donors so I certainly think that it is worth it.

Hope that helps!

Automated Birthday Emails

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