Why you should be saying Happy Birthday to your customers
29. Mar, 2009 
6 Comments
I have written before about Birthday marketing because I think it is a really under utilised tactic. It’s not for every business industry, for example I don’t use Birthday Marketing as a web designer, however for consumer services and products I think it’s a great idea.
Heres an example I’ve written in the past (on a different blog)
Charles is turning 36 in two days. He still hasn’t decided what he’s doing for his birthday, so he plans on just taking a few friends out to a restaurant and have a dinner. Charles gets his morning mail, and in it is a birthday card. He opens it up and it says, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY! We here at would love to see you here for your birthday, so as a present, if you bring four friends, you eat free!”.
Charles is almost certainly going to go to that restaurant. And, who knows, if the service is great and the food is great, it might just become his restaurant of choice.
That’s a hypothetical example, but now for a real life one.
My girlfriend gets her eyebrows waxed probably about once a month. If it were me, I’d find a place I like and go there all the time, but for some reason, she is constantly trying new and different places to get her eyebrows waxed.
Anyways, a week before her birthday this year, she receives a letter with a $10 gift voucher in it for an eyebrow waxing. Since my girlfriend already wanted to get an eyebrow waxing (she wanted to look good for her party), it’s obvious where she was going to get them done.
It’s always a bit foolish when I try and predict what my girlfriend is going to do, but I can go out on a limb here and say that she is quite likely to go back to that place.
The shop builds up a relationship, gets repeat business, my girlfriend gets a cheap eyebrow wax and everyone is happy!
It doesn’t have to be expensive either. The gift voucher was a black and white print that was cut out with scissors and her name was written in Pen. Aparently the store has a big birthday book where they keep everyone’s names, and manually send them out every day.
Since I like lists so much, I’m going to outline some benefits of Birthday Marketing.
- You can call your coupons a gift voucher
- You cut through marketing clutter because everyone loves when people remember their birthday
- You form a positive relationship
- Low cost and I assume the response rate would be pretty good. Even if the initial offer you send doesn’t get used, you’ve got your business at the top of the customers mind
So how do you go about implementing it?
For small customer bases, the manual option isn’t a bad idea. The whole process feels a bit more personalised for the customer as well (knowing that it isn’t just computer generated).
For larger customer bases, it might be worth looking at software like Aweber to do the job. It has a birthday marketing feature. The downside is that it is just an email based system, however you could set it to give you reminders and then you manually send out letters.
Bigger companies would want to look at something like Impact Data. They have a range of different software packages available, and have a lot of different ways to keep in contact with customers, birthday marketing being just one of them.
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I just wanted to comment that I think you are 100% right about personalizing. What I mean is this, yesterday was actually my birthday and to my surprise I got a personalized SMS from the bank that I use. The story is that I have 2 banks that I’m loyal to, in one of them (which I work in) I have all my accounts, salary and about 5-6 credit/debit cards and then other I just have one debit card that I use sometime. Well this other one that I only have one card in was the one that sent me that message and honestly I have been thinking about this the second day now of considering of moving my main transaction to this bank that sent me the SMS. It just showed me that they care about their customers.
Hope I managed to make some sense.
By the way treat blog!
Thanks for your comment Alen. It’s good to hear some more examples of how this sort of personalization can really help create relationships with customers
well, thats a awesome idea. Never thought of it before. My dad has a restaurant. And i am gonna give him this idea. Thats called professional business. Great thoughts. And great blog.
Thank you Jenifer
Dammit Luke. You’ve just given me ANOTHER idea for a website to build.
Too many website ideas, and not enough time!
Tell me about it Mikey, I actually got to the point of registering the domain birthdaymarketingtools.com for this idea lol. Started a design but never finished it.