I had a birth­day last week and on top of receiv­ing cards in the mail from friends and fam­ily, I got a few emails from var­i­ous com­pa­nies wish­ing me a happy birth­day. I thought it was a really nice touch for these brands to make the effort. Some included dis­counts, oth­ers were well designed, but all of them were appreciated.

Accen­ture

My HR rep­re­sen­ta­tive sent me this sim­ple email to start the day off right. It’s very “Microsoft Clip Art” but in a com­pany of over 180,000 employ­ees, it’s nice to get some per­sonal attention.

ING Direct

One of the banks I use gave me a coupon for their online store to buy some bank schwag. I like ING’s emails. They are always sim­ple and to the point.

Hertz

The other end of ‘sim­ple and to the point’ is ‘long and drawn out with too much infor­ma­tion’ like this Hertz email. They’ve included stuff I really don’t care about like an account sum­mary and Spring clean­ing tips which buries their ‘birth­day bonus’ offer. I think a rule of thumb for emails should be, “if you can’t do a com­plete screen cap­ture on a 24″ mon­i­tor, it should be simplified.”

Coke

I am a brain­washed My Coke Rewards mem­ber. I feel bad if I buy a 12oz can or foun­tain drink because I know I won’t get any rewards points. That aside, I think this is the best designed email that I received. It show­cases the prod­uct, isn’t too pushy with the copy, and makes it easy to unsub­scribe. Most mar­ket­ing emails like this would bury that link way down in the legal fine print.

Harrah’s

Harrah’s Casino had the poor­est email. I was really con­fused by this long really long email that went on for­ever with text then a link, text then a link. It made me feel 10 again in a bad way. Once I found a link to dis­play what they meant to include in the email, it wasn’t so bad.

The Real Effort

Kudos to these few com­pa­nies that put forth the effort to wish me a happy birth­day. It was a nice touch by some com­pa­nies who tra­di­tion­ally might be viewed as uncar­ing (employer, bank, con­sumer good, casino). If I had to guess, I’d say I’ve prob­a­bly given my birth­day out to over 250 web­sites yet I only received a few emails acknowl­edg­ing it. One argu­ment might be that a birth­day is a con­fi­den­tial piece of infor­ma­tion so remind­ing a user that you retain it may worry them. I think it’s a great oppor­tu­nity for brands. What if I’ve totally for­got­ten about your site or prod­uct? What if I had a lin­ger­ing dis­gruntle­ment? Maybe that lit­tle note that says you care as a brand could reel me back in.

What’s even more pow­er­ful than any email is a per­sonal face-t0-face acknowl­edge­ment. The client lead at my cur­rent project blew me away when he stopped by my desk to wish me a happy birth­day. I’ve barely known the guy for 6 weeks, and he was the first per­son in the office to do so. Not the guy I report to, not the man­ager above him, not any­one else at Accen­ture — the client. I have no idea how he even knew it was my birth­day, but it spoke vol­umes about his char­ac­ter. I took note of it as “that’s the man­ager I want to be”.

How You Could Send Birth­day Emails

I don’t have any cur­rent projects that could ben­e­fit from this or I’d write out the code to do it. Here’s how I’d approach it though:

  1. You have a data­base of user infor­ma­tion (name, email, birth­day, etc.)
  2. You have a cron job that runs daily to see if it’s any of your users’ birthday.
  3. If it is, grab their email and send a form email insert­ing their name where appro­pri­ate (e.g. Happy Birth­day <first_name>)

Put it in the extra effort. It’s worth it to peo­ple like me.