As a business, sending a birthday email to your customers is a fantastic way to increase loyalty and rake in some serious sales.

Because here’s the thing: we’re much more likely to splurge and treat ourselves when it’s our birthday.

You can capitalize on this heightened desire to purchase by offering a birthday discount, free delivery, or another incentive.

Before you start

• Make sure you have created a Date of Birth/Birthday attribute and gathered the Date of birth of your contacts.
• We advise you to create your Email Template before starting this procedure, you'll be asked to choose or create a template in Step 3 below.
• If you want to test your workflow, please make sure you have updated the date of birth attribute at least the day before the testing as explained in Testing.

How birthday emails work

A birthday email is an automated marketing email sent on a customer’s birthday. The message usually highlights the socially uplifting occasion but is truly designed to increase customer retention and word of mouth marketing, while also encouraging recipients to return to a site and make a purchase.

Birthday emails need to be friendly, delightful, and warm. Some of the best techniques to make your email stand out include:

• Offering a personalized gift coupon based on your customers’ interests
• Including a mystery offer to generate intrigue and increase click-through rates
• Having an email design that POPS! Your customer is likely receiving lots of messages on their special day, so you want your email to stand out.

Set up automated birthday emails with Brevo

This workflow will only work for the contacts for whom you have entered a date of birth. Make sure you have created and filled up the associated attribute.

Step 1: Select the Anniversary Date workflow

1. Go to Automations.
2. Click Create a workflow.
3. Select Anniversary Date.
4. Click Use this automation.

You'll be guided through 2 steps to create your automation workflow.

Step 2: Create your Anniversary Date workflow entry point

1. In Select an attribute, in the first drop down select the attribute you created for the date of birth of your contact.
2. In the second drop down, you can select:
   
   
   • is today if you want to send the email on the birthday of your contact.
   • is tomorrow if you want to send the email on the day before the birthday of your contact.
   • is in X days if you want to send an email X days before the actual birthday of your contact.
   • between past days if you want to send an email if your contact's birthday was in the last X days.
   • between future days if you want to send an email if your contact's birthday will be in the next X days.
3. In When to check, enter the time of the day you want Brevo to check the birthday attribute of your contacts.
4. Click Next.

Step 3: Select the email you want to send to your contacts

In this step, we'll ask you to choose the template you want to use for your birthday email.

1. Select an email template from the list.
   You can select:
   • a template you created before,
   • a default template (Default template - Anniversary date_#)
   • or directly create a new one from scratch.

   If you select a default template, you need to update it before activating the workflow.

2. You can select the following options:
   • I want to send a hidden copy of this email: select this option if you want to receive a copy of the email every time a contact receives it. You can send a hidden copy of the email to specific recipients separated by commas or to contacts that contain a certain contact attribute.
   • I want to choose when to send this email:
     • Send at best time: select this option to maximize the open rate by delivering your emails at the optimal time for each recipient over a 24-hour period.
       
       💡 Good to know

       This feature is available for Business and BrevoPlus plans.
     • Choose a specific time frame: select this option to choose when you want to send the email, for example any day of the week at 8 am.
   • Use my event data to customize the email: if you have personalized your email template with placeholders (contact name, quantity of items, etc.), you must select this option in order to pull data from the event. Otherwise, the values in the email sent will be empty.
     • The event data which triggered the workflow: customize your email with additional parameters included in the event you added as your entry point
     • Data from the last received event: customize your email with the values generated by the last received event of the workflow
3. Click Finish.

Activate your workflow

Once you are done setting up the workflow, you can activate it to allow contacts to enter it and receive your email after their purchase.

To activate your workflow, click Activate the workflow.

Testing

🤔 Have a question?

If you have a question, feel free to contact our support team by creating a ticket from your account. If you don't have an account yet, you can contact us here.