A simple, yet effective and often overlooked component of a good email marketing campaign is the birthday email, and we’re not talking about your brand’s birthday, either! Sending an email out to your subscribers when it’s their birthday is a powerful way to build up brand loyalty and retain customers. To do this, of course, you will need to be collecting subscribers’ dates of birth somehow.
The importance of using automation tools for email marketing is a common topic of discussion on the internet among marketing professionals. A good place to start with email automation is the humble birthday email. You yourself are sure to have received one at some time or another, and they are very powerful at encouraging people to perform a desired action.
#1: Why bother sending a birthday email?
To put it simply, because they are good for business and are a very powerful marketing technique. Compared to your run of the mill marketing email, birthday emails have 400 percent higher conversion rates and deliver over 340 percent more revenue per message.
Given that once you have configured your birthday email, written the content and set all the automated parameters, they are sent automatically without you having to lift a finger, save for performing the occasional bit of maintenance. For these reasons alone, birthday emails are something which should be included in every email marketing campaign.
They are one of the simplest and most effective methods of automated email marketing which require minimal upkeep. In addition to this, birthday emails strengthen your business by:
- Generating conversions through the clever use of birthday-exclusive discount codes or special offers. This in addition to the fact that people are much more willing to spend money on their birthdays means you are onto a winner with birthday emails.
- Engaging dormant users with personalised and unexpected content. Birthday emails only come once per year and they often help rekindle relationships between your business and long-lost customers.
#2: How to send a birthday email
Like we have already said, it is very easy to get going with birthday emails and automating them. Each automation system is different and has its own degree of complexity associated with it. The starting point for all automated birthday emails, however, is programming the system to send the email on a given date – the recipient’s birthday – which is information you will need to (legally) harvest yourself.
The simplest birthday email strategy is to send one – yes, one – single email on the date itself. Sometimes companies send multiple emails both on the day and on the run up to the day. This is borderline spam and can have the opposite effect to what you desire. For this reason, it is recommended that you only send a single birthday email. By doing this, you don’t ruin the point of it: to be a one-off special occasion email.
What your birthday email includes is entirely up to you. If you want to simply include a happy birthday message that’s fine, however, that’s not going to be the best way to convert the recipient and encourage them to make a purchase. Why not consider including special birthday coupons in your email? These are much more likely to convert; a discounted sale is better than no sale at all! Remember what your end-goal is with this.
#3: Collecting dates of birth
You can’t run an automated birthday email campaign without first having your subscribers’ dates of birth on file. The storing of this information is legal; however, you need to ensure you harvest it legally, too. There are several ways you can do this:
- Through your checkout when your customer makes a purchase. To get this information, simply include a date of birth box and make it compulsory for your customer to enter it alongside their email address in-order to complete the checkout process.
- Through your newsletter subscription form by, again, inserting a field which requests the subscriber’s date of birth. Keep your newsletter subscription form simple by only requesting important information such as name, gender, email and date of birth.
- Through email marketing by requesting supplementary information such as date of birth after somebody has already made a purchase or subscribed to your newsletter. This is a great way to ensure you maximise email subscriptions by not requiring lots of information in the first instance, something which can lead to abandonment.
Collecting and storing dates of birth are entirely legal so long as the information is collected lawfully and stored in accordance with local laws and customs.
Birthday emails are a simple and smart way to improve your email marketing campaign and generate conversions from subscribers and previous customers. It is a great way to make somebody feel valued and to encourage them to make a purchase through the provision of special birthday offers.
