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.

Then, go to the Autoresponders tab and select “Add Autoresponder”.

Once you’ve chosen the list you’d like to have the ongoing autoresponders go out to, you can select how many days before their birthday you’d like to send out the campaign under “send settings”. (Choose “zero” if you want the autoresponder to send exactly on the birthdate.)

Beyond this, you can further customize the autoresponder campaign settings with segmenting. For example, if you’re collecting address data, you can use their zip code to send them a coupon for the location closest to them. Or, create a field on your signup form for subscribers to select their favorite location and use that to customize their reward.

Now you’re all set to design your campaign and start the autoresponder. (Remember, you have to do this from the Autoresponder tab, not the regular Campaigns tab.)

We’ve also got a pre-designed coupon template for you to use if you don’t feel like designing your coupon from scratch.

You can have a birthday autoresponder set up for your list in a matter of minutes, leaving plenty of time for cake.

You might also be interested in:

5 Practical Autoresponder Ideas

Autoresponder Triggers In MailChimp

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).