The Ultimate Guide to Birthday Campaigns: Show You Care While You Sell

It’s fine and dandy to receive just a simple happy birthday message from someone we know. However, when it’s sent from a business, we tend to expect something more 👀. I know it may sound selfish to want a special offer on top of the already kind message. But think of it as a reciprocal gesture which is crucial for customer relationship management.

Moreover, birthday marketing is also a powerful way to personalize the customer experience (CX) and drive more sales 🥰🛍. Below is a successful example from Nike:

By sending a can’t-resist coupon to customers in their birthday month, Nike can not only show customers that they care, but also create incentives to motivate customers to shop more that month.

Some may ask: Any time we send out campaigns for sales and special offers, we are applying the rule of reciprocity, so why would we bother with birthday emails on top?

The stats below tell you why:

Give your customer an integrated birthday experience with Clerk

Powered by cutting-edge AI technologies, Clerk Audience enables you to segment targeted audiences for specific campaigns, such as birthday marketing campaigns here. Doing so allows you to offer your customer an integrated, personalized experience as well as marketing incentives on their significant days 🥳.

By using Clerk Audience and Email together, you can easily set up automatic birthday emails to targeted customers, improving CX and generating sales:

Top tips to optimize birthday marketing emails

To help make your birthday marketing emails stand out from others, here’re some top tips from us:

• Make it personal and use their name in the subject line of the email.
• But DON’T include their age, as this can be a sensitive issue, and you're here to make them feel good!
• Make the message short and sweet. This is about the CUSTOMER (and you too, but don’t let them in on that).
• Have a clear CTA (call-to-action), so they can make use of the offer.
• Automate the emails. These birthday marketing emails are meant to be an easy way to increase conversions, so make it as easy as possible to implement.
• Send reminders - we’ll return on this point shortly.

Send a reminder

It may seem strange to follow up after you’ve sent a birthday wish. Yet, according to Experian’s, reminder emails for birthday offers can generate at least 20% higher open rates, AVO (average order value), and revenue per email 🚀.

Customers may forget your great gift in the midst of their birthday celebrations. Therefore, sending a follow-up message a few weeks after can pay off for both sides.

What’s the best offer to give your customer?

You can offer a money-off coupon, freebie, or a mystery gift. Mystery gifts (think online scratch cards) actually provide the highest revenue, perhaps because they play on our natural curiosity:

Either way, because it encourages direct interaction, to click-to-reveal, you are more likely to get them into your site than with a simple flyer message.

The birthday wishlist

Another way to stand out from other birthday messages is NOT to send them on their actual birthday, as your customer may be inundated with other messages on this day. Although we’ve suggested using follow-up emails, there's another solution 😉.

Send a wishlist a few weeks prior to your customer’s birthday 🔖. It gets them into your webshop to curate a list of any products they wish for and gives you valuable information to design special offers. But it can be even more clever than that! By encouraging them to share the list with their friends, you can expand your customer base too.

Other "just for you" campaigns

Sending birthday greetings may be the epitome of personalized campaigns, but we know that data on customer birthdays is not always collected. In some cases, it is something you don’t know, so how else can you make “just for you” campaigns?

You may not have a customer's date of birth, but you can log the date they join your loyalty program or make their first purchase 💡. In addition, particularly for loyal customers and VIPs, you can acknowledge milestones such as the amount of points collected or years of loyalty. And, unlike with birthdays, you can mention numbers here.

Do you know that there's a 5x higher transaction rate from birthday and anniversary emails than regular email offers?

These campaigns are designed to make customers feel like they're special but don't forget that they can mean a lot for you too. It doesn't have to mean offering huge discounts. A small gesture goes a long way, especially when customers know that they have been personally targeted. So set, forget and reap the rewards 🎁🎉.

With excellent conversions and ROI, birthday marketing emails should be part of every e-commerce business’s marketing strategy 💰! Being the #1 rated e-commerce personalization platform, Clerk can help your e-commerce business automatically grow sales and revenue 💸! Get started by talking to one of our specialists today.