Autoresponders offer a great opportunity for engaging your subscribers over an extended period of time. You may have heard of this strategy referred to as drip marketing, but it doesn’t necessarily just refer to a series of campaigns that extend forward into infinity. It can actually work particularly well in the context of counting down to a special date, like a wedding or the birth of a child. So let’s take a look at how you’d set up this type of campaign using MailChimp’s autoresponders.
If you’ve ever wanted to send automatic “happy birthday” emails to your customers, we’ve just made that a little easier.
We’ve added a new “Birthday” field that you can add to your signup forms:
Unlike the “date” field, the “birthday” field doesn’t require entering the YEAR (some subscribers just don’t want to reveal their exact date of birth).
We also added a few new pre-designed email templates for birthdays, so that making birthday autoresponders would be drop-dead easy…
In the past, we made all our Autoresponders go out at the exact same time (roughly 8pm ET).
Knowing exactly when that process was supposed to kick in like this was good for us back when the feature was new and we weren’t sure about its impact. But as more and more people started to use it, 8pm started to become a little bit of a bottleneck. Suddenly queuing up over 20,000 autoresponder campaigns at once is just not healthy.
So a couple days ago, we changed the process to be more “spread out” over 8 – 12 hrs. As a result, you might start to see your autoresponders arriving in inboxes later or earlier than you usually do. Yep, it’s supposed to do that.
There are two basic autoresponder triggering methods (subscription to list and date-based-triggers) in MailChimp, but there are so many different ways you can use them.
I’ll show you 4 easy examples anybody can build in the MailChimp interface, plus one clever way to use the API to trigger your autoresponder.
A lot of people asked us for automated birthday reminders in MailChimp, so we added it in v4.1. So you can schedule an autoresponder campaign to send an email just before their birthday, or on the day of.
But if you think about it, they’ll probably be getting tons of birthday emails already.
Why not schedule a belated birthday greeting instead? They won’t be expecting that.
