Can I send birthday and anniversary campaigns automatically?

You can store and utilize contact data, like birthdays and other dates, to send automatic campaigns from your account. In this article we will walk through the basic set up of a triggered segment. A triggered segment can be paired with a triggered campaign to automate the sending of paired campaign when criteria of the segment is met.  

How-To

Create the segment.

1. Navigate to the Contacts dashboard and click "Segments" from the left menu.
   
   
   
2. Click the "Create Email Segment" button in the top-right of the screen.
   
   
   
3. Choose "Triggered Segment" from the pop-up menu.
   
   
   
4. Give your segment a name and description.
5. Click open the "Select field..." menu.
   
   
   
6. Scroll through the menu to locate and choose the date you want to use for the trigger event. In this example, I will use the Birthday field.
   
   
   
7. Once a date field is chosen, note the additional drop-down menu displayed:
   
   
   
8. Open drop-down and select "Anniversary" from the menu. *
9. Below the trigger event clause box, optionally include additional clauses to further refine the audience to receive the campaign.
10. Click the "Save and Test" button to complete your segment and verify it is pulling contacts correctly.

Create the campaign.

1. Navigate to the Campaigns dashboard.
2. Click the "Create Campaign" button in the top-right of the page.
3. On the Setup step (Step 1), for the campaign type, choose "Automated Email" and then choose "Triggered".
   
4. Follow the rest of the campaign setup process as normal until the Schedule step (Step 6).
   • • In the Contacts step (Step 3) you will only be able to choose a Triggered segment, no regular segments or categories will be available.
     • In the Test step (Step 5) you will enter two dates to create a window. This date range allows the system to evaluate all data in the window to see if there are any contacts that match the criteria. It is required for testing even if no contacts will actually match at the time of testing.
5. In the Schedule step (Step 6) choose your first send time, how often to check for recipients, how far back you would like to look for relevant recipients, and timing of the message (immediately vs. sending before or after the date used in the segment). We also recommend creating a Report Group for reporting purposes.
   
   
   
6. Click the "Save" button. Once saved, the triggered campaign will run at the frequency set. For instance, if you set "check for recipients every 1 days", the campaign will send at the same time every day to recipients who met criteria since the last time the campaign sent. 

Notes

1. Triggered segments and campaigns are available at the Professional license or above.
2. In step 7 above, anniversary was chosen instead of Exact Date and Time. The reason you don't want to choose Exact Date and Time is that the system will take the year into consideration. You will typically use Exact Date and Time for welcome segments, category join segments, etc. but not for birthday campaigns.

Resources

1. See this related help article about triggered campaigns.
2. Learn more about triggered campaign functionality and how-tos in this online module.