Creating an Automated Birthday Message

Today we’re going to walk through the creation of a quick and easy automated birthday email.  Birthday emails are a great way to engage your contacts, plus, offering someone a discount or special promotion for their birthday shows you really care.  This is greatly simplified by using an automated message.  All you have to do is create the rule and Bronto does all the work.  So let’s get started.

Prerequisites

There are a few things you’ll need to have before we can actually create the rule that controls our automated message, here is a list of what is required:

• A Bronto Professional Edition account
• A date type field in your account that contains birthday information for each of your contacts
• A message that you want to send to your contacts on or around their birthday

That’s it! Once you have all of your ingredients, you are ready to begin.

Automated Messages Rule!

To begin creating the Automated Message rule, go to Messages –> Automated Message Rules, which brings you to the Automated Message Rule page.  This page lists all of your previously created rules, along with information such as what type of rules they are, whether they are active or inactive, and how many messages have been sent as a result of this rule in the past 30 days.  From here, click the Create New Automated Message Rule link on the upper right part of the page.

Rule Creation – Step 1

On the screen that follows, let’s give our new rule a name that indicates what the rule does so that it is easy to identify.  For this example, I would suggest something like “Happy Birthday!”.  We can then choose what type of rule we would like to create. For our birthday message, we’ll use a Date-Based rule.  Once we choose the type, the ‘Type Settings’ box at the bottom will expand to allow us to input our initial criteria.

The first criteria determines what field we would like to use to trigger our rule.  Since we selected a Date-Based rule, only date type fields will show up in this drop down.  This is where we select our Birthday field.  The next criteria asks us what we want to match. For a birthday message, we’ll only want to match the day and month, so our rule will repeat each year on the contacts birthday.  So choose Check day and month every day.  Click next to continue to…

Rule Creation – Step 2 – Content & Scheduling

Step 2 of the rule creation process contains 3 parts.  If you’ve used Bronto to send messages before, part 1 – ‘Sender Options’, should be familiar to you.  It is the same as setting Sender Options for a regular send. You need choose your From Name, From Address and Reply-to Address for the message.  You can also specify if you would like Sender Authentication, Reply Tracking on or off.  The third checkbox here, ‘Override Frequency Caps’, will, if checked, allow this message to be sent to your contacts even if it goes over your normal frequency caps.

Part 2 is where you select the message you’d like to send to contacts who meet the criteria set in Step 1.  Just choose the message from the drop-down box.

Part 3 lets you decide when the message is sent.  You can choose a specific time, and a number of days before or after the criteria matches.  You can also choose whether to defer this message to the next weekday if the date happens to fall on a weekend.  Once you’ve got options set as you like, click ‘Advanced Settings’ to proceed to part 3. If you are satisfied with what you have, click ‘Verify Settings’ to go to step 4.

Rule Creation – Step 3 – Advanced Settings

We’re not going to delve too deeply into the advanced settings here, but you can use this step to set an expiration date on your rule, set how quickly your message goes out, and choose lists and segments that are eligible or ineligible to receive this message.  If you’ve set your advanced settings and are ready to finish up, just click ‘Verify Settings’.

Rule Creation – Step 4 – Verify Settings

This step is pretty self explanatory. It allows you to look over your settings and ensure that everything is looking good.  At the top, you are given a plain english sentence that describes exactly what the rule will do.  Then you can review your sender options and message appearance.  When everything looks good, you can either click ‘Save as Draft’, which will save the rule as deactivated, or you can click ‘Save & Activate’, which will save your rule and start its monitoring process.

The next time you click on your rule from the Automated Message Rules page, you’ll see the detail page for that rule. The detail page shows what the rule is doing, a preview, how many messages have been sent, and links to view tracking reports for those messages.

So that wraps up our guide on creating a simple Happy Birthday Automated Message Rule. For some other great ideas on how to leverage Automated Messages for your marketing campaigns, check out Kristen Gregory’s great post on the Bronto Blog – ‘10 Automated Messages That Rock‘. Go forth and automate!

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

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