Trigger: Customer Celebrates Birthday

Use this trigger in a dialog activity to begin or continue the activity when a customer's birthday is coming up or has arrived.

Once a day, this trigger checks for customers who are celebrating a birthday in the number of days you specify. We can then automate follow-up marketing actions for these customers, such as sending a birthday wish in an email or text message, or issuing a special birthday coupon. Marketing to customers when they are celebrating a birthday can build loyalty and provide customers with a perfect excuse to treat themselves.

Example

Here is an example of a dialog activity that uses this trigger to offer customers a promotional birthday gift:

When a customer's birthday is 7 days away, send the customer an email message offering a birthday coupon for 20% off an order placed in the next two weeks. Issue the coupon to the customer. Then wait 7 days until the customer's birthday arrives. Send the customer a text message with a birthday wish.

Prerequisites for using this trigger

• Make sure the site is configured to support the Management Center marketing features.

• Your site must gather customers' dates of birth and store the dates in the WebSphere Commerce database tables. Typically, customers supply their dates of birth on the registration page or through the account update process.

Guidelines for using this trigger

When you set up this trigger, we must specify the following option:

Option

Description

Number of days before customer's birthday

Specify the number of days before the customer's birthday to trigger the activity. For example: To trigger the activity a week before the customer's birthday, specify 7. To trigger the activity on the customer's birthday, specify 0. To avoid sending birthday-related email or text messages too late in the day, check with a Site Administrator regarding the time of day the site is configured to send dialog activity email and text messages. The timing is determined by two factors: The time of day that the check for customers celebrating birthdays occurs. By default the time is 2:00 AM each day but a Site Administrator can change this time. The time of day that the email or text message will be sent after the previous check occurs: For text messages, by default, the text message will be sent 5 minutes after the check for customers celebrating birthdays occurs. For email messages, see the next section.

Considerations if we are using this trigger to send email messages

If we are using this trigger with the Send Message action, you have two options for specifying when the server sends the email messages on the days that the activity runs. You control these options by selecting or clearing the Send immediately check box in the properties for the Send Message action.

• Option 1: Send email messages immediately following the daily check for customers celebrating birthdays. To set this option, select the Send immediately check box for the Send Message action.

  A Site Administrator configures the time of day that the daily check occurs. By default the time is 2 AM each day. If the site will have a large number of customers celebrating a birthday on a given day, this option is not recommended because it can affect server performance.

• Option 2: Send email messages at the time of day that all marketing email messages are scheduled to be sent in the Administration Console. To set this option, clear the Send immediately check box for the Send Message action. This option is preferable because it has less impact on server performance. However, this option requires a Site Administrator to ensure that the daily check for customers celebrating birthdays is scheduled earlier than the send time for the email messages.

Related concepts
Activity building blocks: triggers, targets, and actions
Triggers in dialog activities

Related tasks
Creating a dialog activity