Wish your subscribers the happiest of birthdays and impress them with your memory and heart-warming customer skills. You can choose to trigger your automation on the same day of the event but if you plan to send them a campaign with a gift, a discount coupon, or an offer, it might be a good idea to give them some time to make the purchase.
If you have already found the Happy birthday email 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 when a specific date is reached. The Wait a specific time interval control step (2) provides an interval between the triggering of the automation and when an email campaign, as defined by the Then send email campaign action step (3), is dispatched.
B. Changing the Recipe
If you are already familiar with how to use Action steps and how to use 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 Happy birthday email recipe only requires the following tweaks:
1. Click on the When a specific day is reached trigger.
2. Define the options that remain using the available fields.
You will need to fill in a time value on the available space, select between days / months / years as a measure of time for the number you set, and define whether your automation will run Before / After the date you will set on the date-time custom field.
Using zero (0) works in such a way as to fire the trigger the same day as the subscriber's birthday is reached - in that case, both Before / After options have the same effect. Click on the Save button when you are done.
3. Click on the Wait a specific time interval step.
4. Fill in the time interval on the available space, and set the unit of time from the drop-down menu. Remember that the time set will be determined by the timezone you set on your account's Time & Date settings.
Click on the Save button when you are done.
5. Click on the Then send email campaign step.
6. 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.
7. Don't forget to activate your automation by toggling the switch to Active.