Make Birthday Wishes Come True For Your Customers

One thing most people have in common is that they love to receive gifts and attention on their birthday.

For marketers, birthdays are a perfect chance to reach out to customers or prospects. If done well, your birthday outreach can be another great part of your customer’s or prospect’s special day. This can help you reactivate dormant customers and drive new customer acquisition, while building up positive brand sentiment, loyalty and advocacy.

But does birthday marketing actually work? Research shows that birthday marketing generates 5x the number of transactions as regular promotional offers¹. Meanwhile, birthday emails have 481% higher conversion rates, 342% higher revenue per message, and 179% higher unique click rates¹.

Birthday campaigns might seem daunting—every day is someone’s birthday!—but there are 4 simple steps to launching your next birthday campaign.

1. Collect birthdays: This step may seem obvious, but you will need to know your customers’ and prospects’ birthdays in order to market to them on their special days. If you don’t have birthday information, partner with a data services provider that can append birth dates to your data list.
2. Create a relevant offer: Birthdays are synonymous with presents. Be sure to send birthday communications with an easily redeemed special deal, coupon, or free gift to make recipients feel special and celebrated. And assuming you have enough data about your customers to know what they like, personalize your communications with tailored offers that will entice them to engage.
3. Hone your audience: Many marketers target current customers for birthday campaigns as a way to thank them for their loyalty, and that’s a great option, especially if you’ve already collected your current customers’ birthdays. However, a birthday campaign could be a great way to get the attention of a prospect audience by demonstrating that your brand cares. If you’re looking to grow acquisition, consider modeling or other predictive analytics tools to help determine which prospects are mostly likely to respond to offers and then target that group with your birthday campaign as well.
4. Pick a channel (or channels), and deploy: Email can be a popular channel for birthday marketing, but don’t sleep on direct mail—who doesn’t love getting birthday cards? Given the success rates of direct mail, it can be a lucrative channel to consider for your next birthday campaign.

Want to learn how to enhance your birthday list? Click here to read more on how to Wish Your Customers a Happy Birthday & Boost Sales!