Here at MailChimp, we love birthdays. The cake, the ice cream, the silly hats…what’s not to like? If you like birthdays, too, why not extend the celebratory fun to your subscribers?

A great way to use data you collect through your signup form is to create an autoresponder campaign to go out for your subscribers’ birthdays. With MailChimp, it’s easy to schedule a Happy Birthday greeting, along with a coupon for people to redeem in your store/restaurant/zoo. Here’s how:

First, you’ll need to have a date field on your form to collect subscribers’ birthday information.

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Returnpath posted a link to this neat email coupon idea from Bath & Body Works.

Email coupons are far from revolutionary, but the thing I like about this one is that they host their coupon image on their server, and then swap it with an “Expired” image whenever the expiration hits.

That way, nobody can accidentally download and print a coupon that was no good. Image swapping – don’t you wish you could do that with newspapers? You could actually create some-what personalized email coupons using a little merge-tag creativity (here’s a tutorial).