You can acknowledge and celebrate customers' birthdays to focus on nurturing customer relationships and increasing retention. Personalized emails or SMS messages sent on their special days can help businesses make customers feel valued and engaged, ultimately fostering loyalty and reducing churn.
Instead of solely focusing on revenue-driven strategies like cart abandonment or cross-selling, businesses can leverage birthday campaigns to enhance the overall customer experience. Businesses can offer discounts, promotions, or exclusive deals tailored to customers' preferences and past behavior to incentivize repeat purchases and strengthen the bond with their audience.
Using customized email templates or SMS messages with personalized content, businesses can trigger birthday campaigns using the Dynamic Date starter to ensure timely delivery on an annual basis. These messages can include special birthday wishes, exclusive offers, or vouchers as a token of appreciation for their continued support.
Overall, birthday journeys serve as an opportunity for businesses to show genuine appreciation for their customers, thereby fostering long-term relationships and driving customer loyalty.
This article aims to explain the following concepts:
Goals
While retaining your users, you can improve your average order value and revenue through the incentives you offer in your journeys. Each targeted and converted user will help you to:
- Increase Retention: By acknowledging customers' birthdays and showing appreciation, businesses can strengthen the bond with their audience, leading to higher retention rates and a loyal customer base.
- Convert Inactive Customers: Birthday use cases provide an opportunity to re-engage inactive customers who may have lapsed in their purchases. By offering personalized incentives, businesses can encourage these customers to return and make a purchase.
- Convert First-Time Buyers to Active Customers: For first-time buyers, receiving a personalized birthday message with a special offer can leave a positive impression and encourage them to become repeat customers, thus increasing their lifetime value.
- Decrease Churn Rate: By fostering stronger relationships with customers through personalized birthday campaigns, businesses can reduce churn rates and mitigate customer attrition over time.
- Boost Average Order Value: Birthday incentives such as discounts or exclusive offers can incentivize customers to make larger purchases or explore premium products, leading to an increase in average order value.
- Increase Revenue: Ultimately, the primary goal of birthday campaigns is to drive incremental revenue by leveraging customers' special occasions to promote sales and encourage repeat purchases. Each targeted and converted user contributes to the overall revenue growth of the business.
Ingest the Birthday Attribute
Birthday is one of the user’s attributes that you can pass from the platforms. You can check the methods below to ingest the Birthday attribute and decide how you will proceed:
- On your website, you can have a custom user attribute included in the Web SDK to pass this data to Insider.
- If you collect birthday information on your mobile app, you can pass the same birthday attribute via Mobile SDK.
- If you have users' birthday information in your CRM, you can upsert this data.
Requirements
Before creating a Birthday journey for your users, make sure that you meet the requirements below:
- You must have Insider Tag integration completed on your website.
- You need to integrate the birthday attribute.
- If you have a mobile app, you must have SDK Integration completed.
- Before starting to use any channel in your journeys, integrations for the respective channels should be completed. Depending on the channels you want to use in your journeys, additional integrations might be required.
- User's birthday information should be passed to Insider.
Create a Birthday Journey
Any user who is using the services and products from any vertical will be glad when their birthday is celebrated by the brand they like. Especially when you offer them incentives and discounts, and you do this annually!
Meet James, a frequent user of your travel agency services who has a birthday coming up. As part of your marketing strategy to celebrate and retain loyal customers like James, you've designed a personalized birthday campaign to make him feel valued and incentivize him to book another trip with your agency.
Email campaign
You kick off the campaign and send James a heartfelt email wishing him a happy birthday. The email is personalized with his name and includes a special voucher offering a discount on his next booking with your agency.
Dynamic content is used to insert James's name and the unique voucher code into the email template, making the message more engaging and relevant to him.
The email is scheduled to be sent automatically on James's birthday each year, ensuring that he receives the offer in time to take advantage of it.
SMS outreach (fallback option)
If James is not reachable via email or doesn't open the email, you have a fallback plan to reach out to him via SMS.
Using the SMS channel, you send James a brief birthday message along with the same voucher offer as in the email. The message is kept concise yet personalized to grab his attention.
To ensure optimal timing and respect James's preferences, you utilize the Wait Until a Time Slot element to restrict SMS delivery at specific hours during the day, avoiding any inconvenience to James.
By executing this birthday campaign effectively, you aim to celebrate James's special day and encourage him to continue engaging with your travel agency's services, ultimately fostering customer loyalty and driving repeat bookings.
You can use the ready-to-use Birthday journey template and customize it or you can create from scratch.
1. Select the starter
On Dynamic Date is a starter that triggers the journey based on the user’s date type attributes or date type event parameters.
- Select your custom birthday attribute in the Dynamic Date starter.
- Activate the Repeat Annually option to ignore the year of the date for each user’s birthday. In the birthday case, the year is not a usable part of the date since every year users have a birthday, and also their birth year is past.
- You can take users on the journey and send a message before their birthdays when you select the Before the Date option. For example, you can send a voucher code 7 days before the user's birthday to give them time to redeem the voucher code while the birthday is coming.
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2. Build your journey
You can follow the steps below to build your birthday journey.
1. Add the Wait element
On Dynamic Date triggers users once a day at 01.00 (GMT+0).
- Add the Wait element accordingly after the starter element while you are designing your journey flow so that you do not send messages at white hours based on your time zone.
- You can also add the Wait Until a Time Slot to your journey to proceed users to the channels step in a certain period.
2. Filter your users
You can add a Check Conditions element to filter users for different paths on the journey flow. With Check Conditions, you can:
- Segment users based on their previous purchase history, including frequency, value, and product categories.
- Segment users based on their language.
- Segment users based on website interaction.
- Segment users based on demographic data such as age, gender, or location.
- Segment users based on their channel reachability.
- Segment users based on any attribute or event parameters you want.
3. Check reachability
Before sending a birthday email/message, you can check if users are reachable on that channel. If not, you can try another channel on another path. With Check Reachability, you can:
- Assess users' reachability on selected channels, they receive your messages from the prioritized channels if they are reachable.
- Prevent users from dropping out of the journey and ensure that they are directed to the appropriate path based on their reachability.
- Optimize your budget and resources to the correct channels.
4. Reach your users via the Best Channel
You can use the Next Best Channel element in your birthday use case to significantly enhance the effectiveness of your campaign when you ensure that your message reaches the recipient through the most optimal channel.
- Optimizing reachability: The NBC element considers factors such as user preferences, past engagement behavior, and channel effectiveness to determine the best channel for each recipient. This helps maximize the likelihood of your birthday message being delivered and seen by the intended recipient.
- Enhancing engagement: Different users may have different preferences for communication channels. By leveraging the NBC element, you can tailor your birthday messages to each recipient's preferred channel, increasing the likelihood of engagement and interaction with your brand.
- Maximizing conversion: The ultimate goal of your birthday campaign is to drive conversions, whether through repeat purchases, bookings, or other desired actions. By selecting the most effective channel for each recipient, the NBC element helps optimize conversion rates by delivering messages in the channels where users are most likely to respond positively.
- Adapting to user behavior: User behavior and channel preferences may evolve over time. The NBC element continuously adapts to changing user dynamics and channel effectiveness, ensuring that your birthday messages remain relevant and impactful in engaging recipients, even as their preferences shift.
- Improving campaign ROI: By leveraging the NBC element to deliver birthday messages through the most effective channels, you can maximize the ROI of your campaign. By reaching recipients where they are most likely to engage, you can minimize wasted resources on less effective channels and allocate resources more efficiently to channels that deliver the highest returns
5. Select your channels
When adding channels, you should consider the following factors:
- User preferences: Different users have varying preferences when it comes to communication channels. Some users may prefer email for receiving promotional messages, while others may prefer push notifications or text messages. This is where Architect steps in to help with the Next Best Channel element.
- Channel effectiveness: Each communication channel has its own strengths and limitations in terms of reach, engagement, and conversion rates. For example, email may be effective for delivering detailed and personalized messages, while push notifications may be more suitable for time-sensitive reminders.
- Audience segmentation: Different segments of users may respond differently to messages delivered via various channels.
- Reachability: Review your User Reachability data on the Overall Analytics Page. Assess the number of reachable users across individual channels or channel combinations. By leveraging insights about the user reachability, you can design journeys that capitalize on the best-performing channels, ensuring optimal engagement and outcomes.
For the Birthday use case, both email and SMS channels are highly recommended for reaching out to users on their special day.
Email provides:
- Personalization: Email allows for highly personalized messages, including the recipient's name and birthday details, which can make the user feel valued and appreciated.
- Visual appeal: You can design visually appealing email templates with birthday-themed graphics, colors, and animations to capture the recipient's attention and create a memorable experience.
- Incentives and offers: Email provides an excellent platform for delivering special birthday offers, discounts, or vouchers that encourage recipients to engage with your brand and make a purchase.
- Convenient delivery: Emails can be scheduled in advance to ensure they are delivered to recipients' inboxes on their actual birthday, making it a convenient and timely way to celebrate with them.
SMS provides:
- Immediate delivery: SMS messages have higher open and read rates than emails, making them ideal for time-sensitive birthday greetings that users are likely to see right away.
- Short and sweet: SMS messages are limited in characters, which encourages concise and to-the-point communication. This can be advantageous for delivering a simple birthday wish or reminder about a special offer.
- Direct interaction: SMS provides a direct channel for engaging with recipients, as most people carry their phones with them at all times. This increases the likelihood of the birthday message being seen and acknowledged promptly.
- High engagement: SMS messages have a high engagement rate, with many users responding to or acting on them within minutes of receiving them. This makes SMS an effective channel for driving immediate action, such as redeeming a birthday offer or making a purchase.
You can leverage the unique strengths of each channel to create a comprehensive and impactful user experience that enhances user engagement, fosters brand loyalty, and drives conversions.
Creating content and sending the initial message
After deciding on the channel you want to use for birthday, you can start designing your content. Birthday email or SMS notifications create valuable moments for users and build loyalty to your brand.
- You can personalize your messages based on user properties. Especially using their first name in the messages will help you personalize your content.
- You can also give some special offers or discounts to new users to engage them.
- You can give some special offers or discounts to new users to engage them.
- Make sure the content design is consistent with the design on your website and mobile app.
- Make sure images and GIFs have high resolution.
You can follow these best practices to compose your email:
- Use preheaders to spark curiosity and encourage recipients to open the email by hinting at its content.
- Highlight the benefits of opening the email and redeeming the birthday offer in the subject line to entice recipients to take action.
- Use subject lines to create a sense of urgency and encourage recipients to take immediate action.
- Including the recipient's name in the subject line to grab their attention and make the email feel more personalized.
- Incorporate emojis in both the subject line and preheader to make the email stand out in recipients' inboxes and convey excitement.
Below you can see a content example:
Subject: "Happy Birthday, [Name]! Your Exclusive Offer Inside. 🎉"
Preheader: "🎂 Birthday Wishes, [Name]! Enjoy Your Special Gift Today!"
You can follow these best practices to compose your SMS message:
- SMS messages should be short and to the point. Avoid lengthy content that may overwhelm recipients.
- Use dynamic content to personalize messages with the recipient's name and birthday details for a more engaging experience.
- Include limited-time offers or expiry dates to create urgency and encourage recipients to take immediate action.
- Provide a clear call-to-action (CTA) that prompts recipients to redeem their birthday offer or visit your website.
- Show appreciation to recipients for their continued support and loyalty to your brand.
Below you can see a content example:
Message: "🌟 Your Birthday Gift Expires Soon! 🎁 Get 25% off all purchases today only. Don't miss out, shop now!"
Message: "🎂 Happy Birthday, [Name]! 🎉 Claim your 30% birthday discount now. Tap to shop and save!"
Follow-up messages and Best Practices
After sending the initial message, you can control if the users complete your desired goal such as purchasing the item, adding the item to the cart, etc. after a while. You can add a Wait element to give time to users, then you can add the Check Conditions element to check if the users perform the specified action.
You can follow these common practices for messaging frequency for birthday use cases:
- Sending a single birthday message on the recipient's birthday is a common practice. This message typically includes a personalized greeting, birthday wishes, and any special offers or discounts.
- You may send a follow-up reminder if the recipient has not redeemed their birthday offer within a certain timeframe, such as a week after their birthday. This reminder gently prompts the recipient to take advantage of the offer before it expires.
- Sending an annual birthday greeting is a standard practice for maintaining customer engagement and loyalty. When you send a birthday message every year, you can show appreciation for your users' continued support and strengthen your relationship.
- Providing recipients with the option to opt out of birthday messages is a best practice that respects their preferences and privacy. Including an unsubscribe link in birthday messages allows recipients to manage their communication preferences easily.
- Segmenting recipients based on their response to birthday messages can help optimize messaging frequency. For example, active users who redeem their birthday offers promptly may receive additional perks or exclusive rewards, while inactive users may receive fewer messages or no further birthday communications.
You can create your birthday use cases following these best practices:
- Personalize birthday messages with the recipient's name and birthday date to make them feel special and valued.
- Send birthday messages on the recipient's actual birthday to maximize impact and relevance.
- Include special offers, discounts, or birthday gifts in the birthday message to incentivize recipients to engage with your brand and make a purchase.
- Include a clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA) in the birthday message, prompting recipients to redeem their offer or visit your website to make a purchase.
- Ensure that birthday messages are mobile-responsive and optimized for smartphones and tablets, as many recipients may access them on mobile devices.
- Obtain consent from recipients before sending birthday messages, provide an option to opt out of further communications, and comply with relevant data protection regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA.
- Segment your audience based on their birthday date and preferences to tailor the content and timing of birthday messages for maximum relevance and effectiveness.
- Test different messaging formats, offers, and timing strategies to optimize the performance of birthday messages over time. Analyze metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to identify areas for improvement and refine your approach accordingly.
- Follow up with recipients who redeem their birthday offers with a thank you message, expressing gratitude for their continued support and encouraging further engagement with your brand.
- Use birthday messages to foster long-term relationships with users. Offer them personalized recommendations, exclusive perks, and ongoing communication beyond their birthday.
3. Launch your journey
If you are all set, launch your journey in test status to conduct a test or in active status to go live.
Example flow:
Here you can take a look at some of the birthday journey flow examples.
- A simple birthday journey:
- A more advanced birthday journey:
