Birthday Email Marketing Examples & Tips
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If there’s one day of the year when you deserve to feel extra special, it’s your birthday.
More brands are investing in birthday email marketing and spoiling their employees and customers with a small birthday gift.
Let’s look into some unexpected reasons to send birthday emails, with real-world examples, templates and tips for both your internal communications and external marketing.
Birthday emails are automated emails sent by brands on a customer’s birthday.
They provide a warm and personalized experience, delighting customers and encouraging a greater degree of loyalty. Most brands offer a special discount or birthday gift with this email.
Birthday emails are also used in business internal communications. They go to employees to build engagement, highlighting their special day and showing they’re valued. Birthday emails for employees might come complete with a gift, such as a voucher.
While birthday emails are primarily a kind gesture, birthday email marketing can also benefit businesses in unexpected ways.
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Birthday emails boast an open rate of 45% on average - a big step up from the 20.81% average open rate for general marketing emails!
Here are some reasons businesses shouldn’t skip the big ‘Happy Birthday!’ email:
You can harness all of these benefits without spending hours crafting every birthday email.
With an email builder, the design process takes just minutes. Access hundreds of engaging, customizable email templates and edit them with a drag-and-drop tool. You can update every template with your company branding and save it in your library for future use.
This perk is incredible for collaboration. Anyone with permission on your team can log into the account, access and personalize the approved templates, and export on-brand emails in minutes.
Whether you’re crafting birthday emails for employees or your customer base, studying the best birthday emails is the perfect route to your own successful campaign. Here are some examples to get you started.
A simple message is enough to let employees know you haven’t forgotten about their special day.
The best approach here puts multi-media at the front and center, using bright colors and fun images that delight the recipient.
Some of the best birthday email marketing examples make the discount or offer the star of the show.
Emphasize exactly what you’re offering to promote website visits and sales.
Amtrak uses a birthday cake graphic to encompass the discount, for a fun approach and a saving that can’t be missed.
Birthdays are a time for fun, so skip the corporate birthday emails and go for a memorable, light-hearted message.
Humor builds connections, and pairing this with a great offer could be a magic formula for a sale.
Just be sure to keep jokes on-brand. Consider asking a colleague for feedback before adding it to your birthday email template!
OLIPOP does this well, although this example is all about the brand’s birthday, rather than the subscriber’s.
Show your subscriber how well you know them by going above and beyond in the personalization stakes.
Use the recipient’s previous behaviors to offer an exclusive gift or discount you know they’ll love.
Give a birthday gift they won’t want to wait around for.
Play on the fear of missing out, by adding a time limit onto the exclusive birthday discount.
In this example, Jetson Health shares a money-off code that’s valid for one week only. This brand is emailing to celebrate its own birthday, but you can follow the same tactic with birthday emails for your customers.
Emails with interactive elements like videos, GIFs and polls grab attention and guide recipients towards the desired action.
Email builders integrate with third-party websites so you can access images, GIFs and videos without leaving the platform. In fact, some email builders unlock instant access to over 2 million multi-media assets. Say goodbye to hours spent crawling the web for the right content.
You can use the platform’s in-line image editing tool to adjust, resize and crop images in seconds. Getting the format right is a breeze, and a live preview means you know exactly how your emails will look - whether recipients open them on desktop, tablet or mobile.
Welcome new employees and customers by asking a simple question: When is your birthday? When you have this information, sending birthday emails becomes seamless.
This establishes a strong relationship from the get-go, showing you care about them as an individual and giving the promise of a gift once their birthday rolls around.
Of course, you’ll already have the birthdays of your employees, but to get that data from your customers, you might need an extra incentive…
For external marketing, collecting this information early on can build customer loyalty and lead to purchases down the line. Since you’re requesting personal data here, explain how customers would benefit from this, such as a free gift or birthday discount.
Smart birthday email marketing uses customer data and past browsing or purchasing behavior.
If you have access to subscriber insights, use them to your advantage (a little like if you were running an email retargeting campaign). Recommend products the individual is likely to be interested in, offering an exclusive birthday deal to make them irresistible.
Don’t have access to purchasing data? Get inspired by Stanley. The brand uses the recipient’s star sign to recommend products they might like. It’s a unique - but fun - approach.
The birthday emails you send are competing for attention against so many other emails in your recipients’ inboxes, so make yours stand out with an exciting design.
You don’t have to be a coder or designer to create something with the wow factor. Just use an email builder with customizable modules for almost endless design possibilities.
Email builders remove the worry that unique designs will render poorly across email clients and devices. A messy format isn’t a good look for brands, but you can get peace of mind knowing every design is tested and optimized to look great on every screen and platform.
The best email builders work with over 50 email service providers, including Gmail and Outlook. They also let you send emails via Slack, Teams and social media. However you prefer to share emails, you can be confident your designs will look great.
Get inspired by Pizza Hut, which uses humor and a fun layout to hold engagement and wish their subscribers a very happy birthday. An offer of free cinnamon sticks is an added sweet incentive for recipients to place an order.
The best birthday emails do more than just celebrate a birthday.
They’re a way to build relationships with employees and customers, and to encourage more purchases with customers. Either way, they’re great for your business’s bottom line. Make your emails as effective as possible with these best practice tips.
Automation is your best friend and time saver when it comes to birthday email marketing.
Set up an automated campaign to make employees and customers feel special without much time or effort. Automation is convenient for you, but it’s also consistent.
It will never forget a birthday, so your campaign can run reliably.
Consider sending a birthday sequence instead of one single email on the recipient’s birthday.
This is helpful since many people won’t use the discount on their birthday; it’s easy to forget and move on.
You could send a “warm-up” email to let them know a gift is coming. This builds anticipation and is good for maximizing conversions. Of course, then send the birthday email itself.
Don’t forget the post-birthday email 2-3 days after the big day. Add urgency, such as reminding subscribers when their discount code will expire.
The redemption process should run without a hiccup.
In other words, make it easy for subscribers to claim their birthday gift, whether that’s a freebie, a discount code or something else.
Part of this includes a call-to-action (CTA) that stands out in the email.
Getting started with a birthday email campaign would be a slow and overwhelming process if you had to create every email from scratch.
Use an email builder to not only speed up the design of on-brand, engaging emails, but also monitor the results of your birthday marketing efforts.
Some email builders track all-important metrics no matter where you send your emails, whether that’s Gmail, Outlook or another platform. This unlocks data around open rates, click rates and conversion rates, with heat maps to help you understand which content performs.
With these insights to hand, you can see the value of your birthday emails, and make tweaks to continually improve their performance and maximize engagement.
As you can see from the birthday email examples covered in this blog, every birthday email doesn’t follow the same structure.
Marketers can play with the layout and order of elements to suit their brand.
However, most birthday email templates include the same components. They are:
On the surface, birthday email marketing is a kind gesture to your employees and customers, building human-to-human connections and making subscribers feel appreciated.
However, the benefits run much deeper, with birthday emails fostering loyalty, happier employees and more sales.
Grasp the benefits by using an email builder to design the best birthday emails quickly, and track their results to properly appreciate their value. Get started with email-optimized, engaging templates.
