Creating automated and personalized birthday emails – Click Support

Have you ever met somebody who doesn't like birthday greetings? The simple gesture of acknowledging somebody's birthday almost always brings a smile to their face. Sending birthday greetings to your customers is an easy way to both keep you on their minds and promote a positive relationship. Dynamics and Dynamics can be used to create personalized birthday email templates and automatically send them to your leads and/or contacts when their special day rolls around.

NOTE: Workflows are native Dynamics components, not part of the Dynamics solution, so the technical support we can provide for them is limited.

NOTE: Running a recursive workflow on numerous Contacts could potentially impact the Dynamics’ performance.

Goals

Learn how to use a Dynamics workflow to send a recurring birthday email to Contacts.
Learn about additional ways to send birthday emails

You can easily create a birthday template in one of our email template editors and set to populate dynamically with data from the recipient's record by using FreeMarker text.

In the example template above, I've set the template to populate with the first name of the lead or contact recipient, as well as the full name of the owner of their Dynamics record. Once your template is created, the following workflow can be used to automatically send it out on the recipient's birthday (this workflow only works for contacts, but you can apply the same process in a workflow based on leads). Keep in mind that this workflow will not change the day and month of a contact's birthday, but it will regularly update the year, so if you want to maintain the original value you should create a duplicate birthday field on your contact records to use with this workflow. The workflow, which is set to run both as an on-demand process and a child process, goes through the following steps:

Compare the execution time of the workflow to the date specified in the birthday field on the contact's record.
- If the execution time is before the birthday, then the workflow will time out until the birthday rolls around
  - When it is the contact's birthday, the birthday email is sent out
- The birthday field value will be incremented by a year
- The workflow calls itself and begins again.
If the execution time was after the contact's birthday instead of before it, then the birthday field value is incremented by a year and the workflow is called again.

Here is the actual workflow:

This workflow will keep going every year until you decide to deactivate it. Once you are ready to use it, save and activate it, then set it to run on any contacts whose birthdays you would like to celebrate.

That's all there is to it! Now instead of spending a fortune on wrapping paper, you can use Dynamics and Dynamics to celebrate everybody's birthday!

Additional Ideas:

You could also use a bulk Email Send at the beginning of each month to send birthday emails. You would have a Marketing List of people with a certain month's birthdays. For instance, you could schedule a bulk Email Send with an associated Marketing List of Contacts whose birthday is in February, to be sent at the first of February. That way the recipient has the whole month to redeem anything you offered in the email, like a coupon for example.

Dynamics Email Sends also let you signify whether to target additional email address fields like email address 2 or 3, while Dynamics Workflows do not let you.

A Dynamics Workflow could also assist here by adding members to a Marketing List that starts as an entry point to a Campaign Automation that can then automate sending the email and any other actions.

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Additional Ideas:

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