You’ve probably seen them before. The clock ticks over to midnight and it becomes 12:01 AM on the day of your birthday, then suddenly your inbox is full of messages offering you special birthday discounts on anything you could possibly imagine.
A birthday offer is one of the simplest marketing automation campaigns to deploy, and many businesses caught on to their power years ago.
But… are these offers really worth it? That depends.
How effective your birthday campaign is has more to do with how your campaign is configured and less to do with the actual offer itself. If your marketing automation expert set up your birthday campaign correctly, you should be seeing tremendous returns from the offer you’re extending. If you’re not seeing that, he did something wrong.
One of the most common mistakes my colleagues make is setting up the birthday message to go out during regular overnight processing. That means the recipient–who already wakes up to dozens of promotional messages anyway–gets your offer lumped in with all their other messages plus dozens of “special” birthday discounts.
And into the trash they all go.
There are better options for setting up your birthday campaign. Here are some of the more effective currently in use across a variety of verticals:
- Send the message about a week ahead of time. You already know when the birthday is, and most automation platforms make it easy for you to send a message X days before or after a given date. Sending your offer several days ahead of time helps your message stand out, plus it lets your customer plan to take advantage of the deal on their actual birthday.
- Send a text (not an email) around noon on the actual birthday. Midday messages are more effective than those delivered overnight, and SMS messaging is a much more direct connection than an email. It’s also really good for timely offers like birthday promotions.
- Use a combination of advance emails and SMS messaging. Go ahead and send the birthday offer about four to seven days before the contact’s birthday, then follow up with a text on the actual birthday date. This approach helps your contact feel special, and serves as a reminder of your offer. (Note: More advanced integrations will let you see if the offer has already been redeemed and, if it has, use conditional messaging to extend another offer to complement the first one).
No matter which approach you use, there’s no questioning that birthday offers help boost your ROI, are easy to configure, and are absolutely something you should be using in your business.