Birthday and Anniversary Campaigns

Introduction

Sending messages on birthdays, anniversaries, and other recurring dates is a great way of keeping customers engaged with your company throughout the year. Customer.io makes this simple. Let’s get started sending your customers a birthday discount, celebrating their time as a customer, or reminding them of something that reccurs on a long time scale.

This recipe documents an anniversary campaign, but the same steps work for any type of date.

Ingredients

• A date of each person’s anniversary stored in an attribute on their profile

Method

Storing the attribute

If you already have the date attribute stored on the people in your account, then you can skip this step.

When you create a new person in Customer.io, you can store their anniversary or birthday date as one of their attributes. This is an example of how you might do that with the _cio.identify() function in the JavaScript snippet:

<script type="text/javascript">
    _cio.identify({
        id: '1899', // must be unique per customer
        email:      'john@example.com',
        created_at: 1743259962,
        
        // Custom user attributes
        first_name:  'John',
        plan_name:  'free',
        anniversary_date: 1481067323
    });
</script>

Here, I’ve used anniversary_date but you can name this date attribute however you like. Note, we are using UNIX timestamps in this recipe, but it will also work with the ISO 8601 date format.

Once the anniversary_date attribute has been added, when you check out this person in Customer.io, their attributes look like this:

Create the campaign

You will use this anniversary_date attribute as the trigger for your campaign. Customer.io will use the month and day from this attribute to trigger the campaign once per year.

1. From the Campaigns section of the app, pick Create Campaign
2. Select “A particular date” as the trigger
3. Choose “Every year” as the recurrence interval
4. Pick anniversary_date as the attribute
5. Set the desired time of day and time zone to define when the campaign will trigger

Save these settings then add a message to your campaign workflow with your birthday or anniversary content. Once you start the campaign, Customer.io will automatically match each user when their anniversary date occurs.

Wrap Up

This recipe covered the basics, but there are several other capabilities you have when setting up this sort of campaign:

• Choose to send the campaign a certain number of days before or after the anniverary date. For instance, if you want to give 3 days of notice for a promotion they can use on their anniversary.
• Build countdown workflow leading up to a date. Follow this same recipe, then use Delays in your workflow to create a drip of messages.
• Send messages for events that occur monthly (rather then yearly. In this case, Customer.io will use only the day of the month as the recurrence criteria.

If you need any additional help setting up your campaign, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help!