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Sending Automatic Birthday Emails with MailChimp

Advanced tips on how to send birthday offers with list segmentation

In MailChimp, you can easily create a signup form with up to 30 custom fields. So in addition to "Email Address" you can also collect data like "first name" and "last name" and "company" and "title".

With all these fancy fields you can also collect subscribers' birthday information, so that you can send automatic "Happy Birthday" emails to your customers (like below):

We'll take it step-by-step:
1) You'll need to make sure one of those fields is a date field. It's best to title it Birthday, to avoid any unnecessary confusion and sending to people on their unbirthdays.
2) After you have the date field set in your list, go to the Autoresponders Tab and click on "Create Autoresponder".
3) Choose the list you want to send your ongoing birthday campaign to.
4) Under send settings choose how many days before or after their birthday you want to have the campaign sent. If you want to send on their birthday choose "zero".

5) Here's the tricky part - skip over "after" to the "signup" drop down box and choose "specific date" for a one time send or "annual event" to set it up for every year in the future. Then your "birthday" field will be available in the next condition. Once you have the send frequency chosen, you can go back and select before or after. (The reason for this is that most autoresponders will be started as a welcome email or series of emails when one signs up to your list. And since you can't send to them *BEFORE* they signup that option wouldn't be available. But to make the statement logical after it's all set up (1 day(s) before annual birthday) the setup has to be done out of what seems like a logical order.)

6) Name your autoresponder and click "save" and you'll be taken back to the Autoresponders Tab where you can begin to design and create your email by clicking on "create email". If you're familiar with MailChimp that will take you to the familiar campaign builder. If you are new to MailChimp the video below will help you understand how to design your campaign. Once you get to the last step of the Campaign Builder below the pre-delivery checklist make sure you choose "start autoresponder" to start sending out automatic birthday emails.

How to create and design a campaign in MailChimp: