Birthday for Loyalty Customers

[gadzooks]

Re: gathering only existing Loyalty customers' birthdays for future automated birthday offer, then automatically gathering only future Loyalty customers' birthdays for their eventual birthday offer.

We run a fast casual local chain of restaurants and have a current newsletter that goes out monthly to over 16k people. From what I can see on the dashboard marketing portal, the only way to collect customer birthdays is to send one mass collection email to all the individuals whose birthdays we don’t currently have.

Thoughts / concerns:

• We really prefer a once-per-month frequency of our current customer emails

• We don’t want to ask non-Loyalty subscribers for their birthdate in a completely separate email from the one we already send monthly. This feels spammy and we’d likely be looking at a huge number of unsubscribes.

• By targeting only Loyalty customers, we can offer them a bit of a VIP incentive, and this is something extra to promote via our social channels to encourage growth in the Loyalty program.

Questions:

• Is there any other possible way to collect birthdays from a specific group of customers? A generic Square profile birthday collection link that I can attach to a button in a more general newsletter? Next best plan: we can ditch a Loyalty-customer-only birthday offer and gather birthdays from all customers in our next monthly send. The idea is that it wouldn't be a standalone birthday collection email. Again, that feels gross.

• For automatic email campaigns, is there no template or workaround to target new Loyalty customers? This is where I'd want to include an ongoing birthday collection link.

The ideal way we’d like to handle this would be to email all existing Loyalty subscribers once, two weeks after our monthly newsletter, then send this same birthday email to new Loyalty subscribers after they sign up. 

I know Square’s email campaign system is designed to be pretty rudimentary, but we’ve been absolutely loving seeing the engagement. Really hoping there’s a workaround available for this.

[gadzooks]

Okay... The current workaround, which sucks to manage, but (hopefully) it's a temporary solution:

Created a page for our Square Online site that's literally just a "Birthday Club" form. It collects First and Last names, existing loyalty email address, and has a date picker that the customer can use to input their next upcoming birthday (we don't care about the year of birth, just the month and day.)

Existing Loyalty customers: sent only this group an email inviting them to share their birthdays to get a free birthday item (credit for a meal). Open and CT rates were great.

New Loyalty customers: set up an email to auto-send to this group with a thank-you, as well as the same linked button and "birthday club" content from the existing Loyalty customer email. Now we're automatically letting new Loyalty customers know about the birthday perk.

Here's the bit that sucks: the form collection is going splendidly (especially since Square automatically imports the form data to our main customer database), but 1. there's currently no way for me to assign the date picker to the "birthday" data column in the main database, and 2. the exported formatting of the form's date picker isn't one of Square's accepted/preferred importing formats, so this data doesn't pull through to the customer profile... because it doesn't know where it's supposed to go.

I'm having to export the form submissions, reformat the date column, import the updated form data (some of which was already automatically imported), then merge the duplicates. What I was hoping would be an automatic set-it-and-forget-it workaround is a manual process that needs to be done regularly to ensure new form data gets logged in time for the birthday.

I LIKE BIRTHDAYS, OKAY, GEEZ