Best practice for a happy birthday email

In a bid to enhance customer engagement, more marketers are starting to use the data at their disposal to implement personalised marketing campaigns based on triggers. Of these campaigns, sending emails triggered by a birthday or anniversary can be put into action quickly and with minimal fuss—provided marketers have collected the relevant information at sign up. To help online retailers get the most from their birthday and anniversary-related emails, Experian Marketing Services has put together a white paper called, simply, The Birthday and Anniversary Report. Here are some best-practice tips from the report.

* First things first—ask for the information
Plain and simple: If you don’t ask, you don’t get. If you want to be able to send customers emails with a birthday-themed offer, remember to ask for their special date at sign up. To collect birth dates from subscribers who didn’t provide the information initially, send an email requesting it. “The content can include an offer or the promise of future offers as well as insider information about your products,” suggests Experian.

* Don’t forget to say “thank you”.
According to Experian, this is not so much about customer’s personal dates, but rather thanking long-standing customers for their custom. Online auction site eBay is a prime example of a business using this tactic.

* Use copy to reinforce the message
Birthday and anniversary emails are the ideal platform to build customer loyalty and promote a positive response from your subscribers. Experian advises reinforcing that positivity with copy along the lines of “Because you are a valued customer, we would like to celebrate your birthday and present you with a coupon with our compliments.” Word of warning though, make sure your subscribers are customers before sending this message. Sending it to a person who may subscribe to your emails, but has never actually bought from you, or bought only once, can erode that feeling of exclusivity.

* Segmentation is crucial
Experian rightly points out that “all customers have birthdays and anniversaries, but not all customers respond the same way to each offer”. It suggests sending offers and discounts based on average order values to “best responders and those that you have not heard from in a while”. It advises testing the inclusion of offers to less-responsive groups to “reduce the risk of lowering margins”.

* Remember, it’s a celebration
Make birthday and anniversary emails fun to open and read. You want to be seen as celebrating with your customers, so use “engaging photography, festive colours, animated .gif image files, and animated video .gif files,” writes Experian.

* Make it personal
Experian Marketing Services’ CheetahMail benchmark data, used as the basis for this white paper, found that including the subscriber’s first name in the subject line increased open, click-through and transaction rates for many merchants. However, before sending first-name personalised emails, first ensure your data is accurate. Second, test the file to determine whether including first names in the subject lines will lift response after all. And don’t try to guess your subscribers' age, adds Experian. “This is due in part to the fact that it is personally identifiable information, and also because many recipients do not like to see such personal information prominently displayed.” Instead it recommends using headers like “A special birthday offer” rather than “Now that you have turned 55, here’s an offer for you”.