The Anniversary recipe can help you personalize your email marketing campaigns to each individual customer and bond meaningfully with them on important dates. Use this automation to create automated celebration sequences for subscription anniversaries, purchase anniversaries made, or other interactions with your website.
If you have already found the Anniversary cart recipe among the available Recipes and know how recipes are laid out, then let's go right ahead and see what this particular recipe constitutes of:
A. Overview
The trigger (1) for this type of automation is called When a specific day is reached and, as its name implies, it fires up the automation in relation to a specific date being reached. It has an additional Control Step Wait for 0 minute(s) (2) that you can edit if you wish to. The first Then send email campaign action step (3) will dispatch a campaign 36000 minutes before the anniversary of the event. Using the Control Step titled Wait for 36000 minute(s)(4) the automation will wait for 36000 minutes to pass, and then according to the second Then send email campaign Action step (5), it will send a second campaign one day before the anniversary.
B. Changing the Recipe
If you are already familiar with how to use Action steps and Conditional / Control steps, you can use that knowledge to change parts of this recipe as you see fit. It's exactly like creating or editing one of your own automation designs: you can add steps, remove steps, or edit the steps already available to fit your design's needs.
You can also save your changes as a custom recipe, and use it at your leisure.
C. Using the Recipe
A recipe cannot be activated as it is. You first need to complete all the incomplete tasks found in the task list and transform the recipe into a fully functional automation workflow. The Anniversary recipe only requires the following tweaks:
1. Click on the When a specific day is reached trigger.
2. Define the three trigger options that remain using the available drop-down menus.
You will need to select the mailing list where the custom field belongs. Then, you should define the date-type custom field based upon which the trigger will fire 30 days prior. You will also need to define how many times you want this automation to run. Your options are:
- Every year on that day and month
- Every month on that day
- Once on that day
Click on the Save button when you are done.
3. Click on the first Then send email campaign step.
4. Select the appropriate campaign options from the available drop-down menus.
This type of action requires that you define a Subject line, the "From" name, the Content as well as set an optional Emails per day cap so that a customer won't get more emails than you would want on the same day. Click on Save when you are done.
5. Click on the second Then send email campaign step.
6. Select the appropriate campaign options from the available drop-down menus.
Again, you will have to define a Subject line, the "From" name, the Content as well as set an optional Emails per day cap so that a customer won't get more emails than you would want on the same day. Click on Save when you are done.
7. Don't forget to activate your automation by toggling the switch to Active.