Collecting birth date information in your forms can be used to engage with your contacts on their birthdays or to celebrate the anniversary of when they signed up to use your product or service. Automating birthday and anniversary emails is a simple way to express your appreciation and build a relationship with your contacts. 

You can also use an account renewal date to create a similar program to send reminders, offers, and other messages of goodwill to celebrate any sort of annual recurring anniversary.

Essentials to Get Started

• A list of contacts containing a date field for a birthday or other type of recurring anniversary

Instructions

1. Navigate to Contacts > Marketing Lists > New List
2. Name your list and select or create a destination folder
3. Click the down arrow to the right of the list
4. Click Create a Segment
5. Click the blue plus icon to add a segment query for the birthdate field
6. Specify Birthdate as the first condition of your segment query 
7. Specify Date > equals as the next condition
8. Click the calendar icon and select relative date as the next condition
   • Relative date compares the month and day of the field information to the current date
9. Define your segment criteria (in days, weeks, or months)
   • Important: Your date format must match the birth date format of your list (e.g., if the list shows "22 Apr 1979," you must select "DD Mon YYYY")
   • Create one rule for every year in the past that you want your birthday segment to reach (e.g., if it's currently 2021, and your contact was born in 1970, you need at least 51)
     
10. Click Save 

Once your new segment is saved, you can integrate it into your automated programs. 

Each subsequent rule will compare the relative date to the current date, and you can specify months in multiples of 12 to correspond to years (12, 24, 36, etc.) for as many years as needed. You can be flexible with the timing of your automated programs, so if you want to send a message 30 days prior to a birthday or anniversary, just set the relative date to 11 months after the target date. 

FAQs and Troubleshooting

For more information on using segments in your automated programs, check out these articles:

• Use Lists and Segments in Automated Programs
• Automated Journey Builder User Guide
• Create a Marketing List

General Advice

• The source list for your automated program should be the birthday or anniversary segment you created
•  Schedule the automated program to enter contacts at least once per day
• Check the Re-Entry option so that the contact will enter your automated program in the following year following year
  • Re-entry is a controlled feature so you must enable this option for the automated program first.
  • If you don’t see this option, submit a support request to have it enabled for your account.
• You cannot use this segment as an Exit Condition as the contacts will exit the program after their birthday or anniversary, removing them from the segment 

In the following example configuration, the automated program is set to add contacts at 8:00 AM, wait one hour, and then send a birthday message at 9:00 AM.

The Wait step is necessary to allow contacts to repeat steps.