Birthday Comments

How to Send Clients a Birthday Greeting Using Mail Chimp
By Katherine M Davison

Receiving a greeting for your birthday (as long as it does not mention your age) is a nice way to show your customers that you remember them on a more personal level. In order to do this you will need to know what the person’s birthday is. A good way to capture the information is when they sign up to your newsletter or for your alerts, and Mail Chimp does this brilliantly.

You start by creating a list, if you don’t have one already. You will need to add a field for birth date. To do this:

• Click on the List tab
• Click on settings within the list bar of the list to amend
• Click on List Fields and *|Merge|* Tags
• Scroll to the bottom and click on add a field
• Click on Date
• Replace Untitled to whatever name you want to call it, ie Birth Date
• Tick the box in the required column if you would like it to be required
• Change MMERGE# if you would like to match the field name, ie BIRTHDATE
• Click on Save at the bottom of the screen.

Once you have a date in the list, click on the Autoresponders tab and click on the Create Autoresponder button. An autoresponser is an email that will be sent on a certain trigger, in this case date. Complete the autoresponder form:

• Use the drop down to select the list to use
• For the Send Settings change the 4 option;
  • Number, for the number of days, weeks etc depending on the next field
  • Dropdown for the time period, days, weeks etc
  • Use the dropdown to change after to before
  • Use the last dropdown to change signup to date, then another dropdown will appear use this to select the Birthdate field you created
• In the name field type the name you would liketo know this autoresponder
• Click on the Save button

Once the parameters are set you can create the email using whatever template you would like. Click on the create email and follow the same steps as for a campaign. If you would like the person’s name within the email, such as for me it would read

Happy Birthday Katherine, all of us here at Epiphany Training Ltd would like to wish you…

You can see that most of that would be standard text, except the person’s first name, (if they entered it when subscribing), is easy with the use of Merge Tags. At the bottom of the edit email window is a hyperlink for Advanced merge tag reference which will pop up and show them, they are usually the field name without spaces and enclosed in | which is found in different locations on different keyboards. On the email it would look like;

Happy Birthday |FName|, all of us here at Epiphany Training Ltd would like to wish you…

The tag can be formatted to blend in with the text around it like you would format any of the other text. Then Mail Chimp will magically merge the first name into the text so it looks great going out.

Katherine Davison

Sign up for her free monthly newsletter at http://www.katherinedavison.co.uk/about-me/newsletter and receive an Outlook Quick Reference Card.

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