It can seem “cringy” but it’s a legitimate relationship milestone. We live in an age where you can take less than 10 seconds to wish someone a happy birthday on their Facebook wall, and yet it shows you care about them. It’s low effort, and easy to be pessimistic about, but to your members, hearing happy birthday can be very meaningful.
Building member relationships using timeline events.
It’s a small thing but saying happy birthday to your members is a good way to show you care about them and that your relationship together is growing and you are trying to nurture it. This will be remembered when considering their membership in the future. It’s quite a simple thing to automate an email that will wish them a happy birthday on the correct date. But to do it manually could be quite time consuming. That’s why we recommend setting up your technology stack to do it all for you.
How to say Happy Birthday to your members.
Collecting the data
First of all, you can’t wish someone a Happy Birthday if you don’t know when their birthday is. So unless this is data you collect when a member signs up, you’re going to need to come up with a way to get this user data such as a form.
Create an email template
Now, crafting a new email with unique content for each member would be amazing! but realistically impossible. You don’t need to create any original content for your birthday emails, you simply use personalisation to make sure you address it to the right person. However you may want to shake up your designs every year.
Automate and relax
You can manually send the email from a Spreadsheet, but we recommend using a workflow to automatically send your members an email using the date as a trigger stored in your CRM. Don’t have a super powered CRM yet? Let’s talk, because Lighthouse offers a superpowered CRM system that does way more than sending birthday emails. You can automate every part of your membership organisation (you know that stuff that gives you late nights and headaches). Then you can get back to adding value to your members.
Need a hand setting this up? Contact us for quote
Pro tip when saying Happy Birthday to your members.
Don’t forget to add a CTA (Call To Action)
This is a unique contact point with your customer and a once a year opportunity to get their attention. Make sure you use this ideal time to remind them how you value them, make them an offer they can’t refuse (hopefully), or simply remind them what great things you do for them as a membership organisation. So when creating your birthday emails consider adding a link to information about all the great things you’re doing, or if you can, a unique special offer.