Build a Happy Birthday campaign in Eloqua

Simple, fun, and a fine reason to reach out to your customers and leads. If you collect birthdate data for you contacts, Eloqua gives you an easy way to send a birthdate email. Here’s how!

First, build your segment:

It needs to look for your Birthdate field, no matter if it’s in a CDO or on the Contact Table.
The criteria is “Dynamically equal to Today (No Year)”
Annnndd, that’s it!

Next, a shared filter.

We’re big fans of fail safes. We want to be sure that we’ve covered our angles. Because of this, we’re going to create a shared filter with the exact same criteria. More on this in a minute.

Finally, the canvas.

Because you’re unable to allow contacts back into a campaign canvas, while also refreshing a segment, we need to keep everyone on the canvas. And so, we’ll use the shared filter we created, and place it after a 360 day wait step. The no path from the filter will wait 1 day, then feed back into the filter. In theory, this should mean that your contact would wait 360 days before going to check if it’s their birthday today. Since it won’t be, they’ll recheck every day until the answer is yes.

We like this, because there are reasons a contact may get an email sent a day later, and this simply makes sure they get the email on their birthday next year, even if it’s a day late this year.