Send a Birthday or Anniversary Email

Celebrate the big and small moments with your customers. Whether it’s a birthday, an anniversary, or another big day celebration, show your loyal customers some love with a congratulatory email! There are just a few things you'll need to complete before you send a date-specific email in Drip.

Before You Get Started 

Drip requires all dates to be in ISO 8601 format ( e.g. YYYY-MM-DD). 

For example, if someone’s birthdate is January 2, 1980, the date must be passed into Drip in the following format: 1980-01-02.  

Import dates as custom fields via CSV file. Drip does not currently provide a date picker to save dates for people, so all dates must be passed from elsewhere into your account (the easiest and most commonly used method used to enter data into Drip is via CSV file.) 

Here's a simple CSV file example:

In addition to the CSV method, you can pass data into Drip via our JavaScript and REST APIs.

Install a Shareable Workflow

Install the Birthdays and Anniversaries Workflow in your Drip account, and open the Workflow inside your account once it's installed.

1. Go to Workflows > Workflows > Birthdays and Anniversaries

2. Toggle your Workflow ON to activate the Workflow

While viewing the Workflow in your account, you’ll notice that the Workflow isn't what actually sends out the birthday email to people. The Workflow's only job is to run a calculation to check whether or not the current person’s birthday has already passed for the current calendar year. If it has, the Workflow sets their next birthday for 1-year later. If it hasn't passed, the Workflow sets their next birthday for the current calendar year.

Once the Workflow has returned the person’s next birthday, it Triggers a Rule that queues up a one-off email on the person’s birthday. In the next section, we'll walk through how to create the Rule in your account.

Set Up a Rule

Now that you have the Workflow installed, create a Rule to Trigger the birthday email. 

1. Go to Workflows > Rules > + New Rule

2. Under What should trigger this rule? Select Updated a custom field

   

   We set the field identifier to next_birthday because that's how it is set in the Workflow. If you modified any of the custom field names used in the Workflow, be sure those changes are reflected in this step.

3. Under What actions should we perform? Select Send a one-off email

   

4. Select an Email Builder and design your email
5. Click Change > Perform this action based on a property of the trigger event

   

   If this Rule performed the action immediately, it would not take the date set by the Workflow into consideration, the email would be sent immediately. When you perform an action based on a specific property, you have more control over how the setting performs.

6. Enter the following Liquid shortcode into the action: {{ subscriber.next_birthday }}

   

7. Add an additional action under the action to Add a person to a Workflow to ensure the birthday field will set forward and Trigger again the following year

8. Just like the one-off email, change the timing of the action to perform based on a property of the trigger event

   

9. Click Save Rule in the bottom right corner

10. Lastly, Activate the Rule

Once your automations are active, be sure to test everything before you start scheduling your birthday and other date-specific emails. Double-check that: 

• Both the Rule and Workflow are active.
• Custom field names are correct. 
• All dates are entered in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD).