Birthday Program Template

The Birthday Program lets you automatically send a personalised email to your contacts on, or around, their birthday.

Before you start, you should be familiar with:

Dotdigital Program Templates

Why set up a Birthday Program?

You can use a Birthday Program to send birthday wishes to your Customers.

You may also wish to send personalised incentives such as discounted Tickets or complimentary drinks to encourage your audience to celebrate their birthday with you.

How does it work?

The date of birth field in Spektrix can be automatically synced to Dotdigital. This can then be used to enrol Customers into a Program, where they’ll automatically receive an email on, or around, their birthday each year.

You can prompt Customers to provide a date of birth when signing up for your mailing list or you could ask Customers to log in and give you this data in a welcome or post-show email.

Before you start

Before you start to build any Dotdigital Program Template, you’ll need:

A synced address book: Contact Support if you need to set up a new synced address book.
Calculated Metric Data Fields: Follow the steps in the Calculated Metrics section of the Data Fields in Dotdigital article.

For the Birthday Program, you’ll need to prepare:

One triggered email campaign with a birthday greeting. You may want to consider including an Offer for or information about an Event.

Consider using Personalisation to make your emails more effective. For example, you could try personalising the email using an informal salutation.

TIP: Not everyone celebrates their birthday. You can respect individual preferences by offering an opt-out option. This could be done with a Tag that customers can select themselves in their online account.

How to set up a Birthday Program

In your Dotdigital account, navigate to Automation > Programs. Click on the folder named Spektrix Templates. Find the Birthday Program template.

REMINDER: When building your Program don’t forget to regularly click Save to save your progress.

1. Set the Spektrix Sync Exit Condition

Follow the instructions in the Dotdigital Program Templates article to set the Spektrix Sync Exit Condition.

2. Create a Start Condition

Click on the blue start node.

Create a start condition.png

Apply the following settings.

Enrolment Scheduling:

Click Set Schedule.
Choose daily.
Set the time of day you want contacts to enrol.

Enrolment Scheduling Daily.png

Click Apply.

Enrolment Rule:

Click Set Rule.
Choose Contact date field, then click Select Date Field.
Select Birthday / anniversary program.
If you want to send the email on the day of their birthday choose the on option next to Add contacts. Alternatively you can choose a number of days before or after.
From the Date dropdown, choose DATEOFBIRTH.

Click Apply twice.

Enrolment Limit:

Click Set Limit.
Choose Re-enrol contacts on the program if they meet the start criteria, but not if they have been enrolled in the last.
Set the number to 365 days.

Click Apply twice.

3. Add the Email Campaign

Select the green email campaign node.

Select or create the triggered email campaign you want to send to customers to celebrate their birthday.

4. Activate the Program

To start your Program click the Activate button.

WARNING: You will not be able to start your Program if there are any validation issues.

Validation issues will be listed under the Validation menu.

TIP: You can't edit a program while it is active, but you can deactivate the Program at any time to make changes.

Reporting

We recommend that you test and refine your Program to see which settings are most effective. You can use the Dotdigital Program report to evaluate this Program.

Consider the following: