Creating automated and personalized birthday emails

Have you ever met somebody who doesn’t like birthday greetings? In my experience, the simple gesture of acknowledging somebody’s birthday almost always brings a smile to their face. Sending birthday greetings to your customers is an easy way to both keep you on their minds and promote a positive relationship. ClickDimensions and CRM can be used to create personalized birthday email templates and automatically send them to your leads and/or contacts when their special day rolls around.

You can easily create a birthday template in one of our email template editors (the example template above was created in the ClickDimensions block editor) and set to populate dynamically with data from the recipient’s record by using FreeMarker text. In the example template above, I’ve set the template to populate with the first name of the lead or contact recipient as well as the full name of the owner of their CRM record.

Once your template is created, the following workflow can be used to automatically send it out on the recipient’s birthday (this workflow only works for contacts, but you can apply the same process in a workflow based on leads).

Keep in mind that this workflow will not change the day and month of a contact’s birthday, but it will regularly update the year, so if you want to maintain the original value you should create a duplicate birthday field on your contact records to use with this workflow.

The workflow, which is set to run both as an on-demand process and a child process, goes through the following steps:

  • Compare the execution time of the workflow to the date specified in the birthday field on the contact’s record.
    • If the execution time is before the birthday, then the workflow will timeout until the birthday rolls around
      • When it is the contact’s birthday, the birthday email is sent out
    • The birthday field value will be incremented by a year
    • The workflow calls itself and begins again.
  • If the execution time was after the contact’s birthday instead of before it, then the birthday field value is incremented by a year and the workflow is called again.

Here is the actual workflow:

This workflow will keep going every year until you decide to deactivate it. Once you are ready to use it, save and activate it, then set it to run on any contacts whose birthdays you would like to celebrate.

That’s all there is to it! Now instead of spending a fortune on wrapping paper, you can use ClickDimensions and CRM to celebrate everybody’s birthday!

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