Birthday gifts

⛔ You cannot set this up yet. Loyalty has not been released to stores, so there is no Loyalty entry in your sidebar and none of the screens below exist for you today. This describes how it will work once it ships. See what Brainerce does not do.

A birthday email with a real gift inside consistently outperforms every promotional email: it's personal, it's expected, and it lands on an occasion the customer is already thinking about. Brainerce automates the whole thing.

The occasion is the only deadline here. The gift coupon itself never expires. See "The gift coupon never expires" below before you choose how generous to make it.

Turn it on

Open Customers → Loyalty → Settings → Engagement & growth → Birthday gift:

That's the entire setup. No campaign builder, no scheduling.

How it works

1. A birthday lands on the customer record. Month and day only, never a year, so you are not holding anyone's age. It can come from the customer on your storefront, from your own typing in the dashboard, or from a file you import (see "Where a birthday can come from" below).
2. Every night, Brainerce finds customers whose birthday enters the send window.
3. Each one gets a one-time coupon minted from your chosen reward, delivered in a birthday email, in the customer's own language, using your store's branding. You can customize the template under Settings → Email templates (event: Birthday reward).
4. The coupon works at checkout across your sales channels.

Where a birthday can come from

Four routes, all of them filling the same field on the customer record. It is month and day only, with no year anywhere.

Having a birthday on file is not the same as being reachable. Whichever route it arrived by, the gift email only goes to customers who accepted marketing.

Add or change a birthday in the dashboard

Click a customer in Customers to open their record, set the birthday, and save. Use it to fix a typo, or to record a birthday a customer gave you by phone or in the shop.

It is month and day only. There is no year field, so you cannot store a customer's age or date of birth here, and nothing in Brainerce works out how old anyone is.

Adding a birthday sends nothing immediately. That customer simply joins the next nightly run, and still only receives the gift if they accepted marketing.

Import birthdays from a spreadsheet

Customers → Import now reads the birthday along with the rest of the customer file, and Export writes it back out, so export, edit in a spreadsheet, re-import is a round trip that keeps birthdays. It did not use to be: an export followed by an import silently dropped every birthday on file.

Two things hold whatever format your file uses. A birthday Brainerce cannot read never fails the row: that customer is imported without a birthday, and the import preview shows a warning naming the cell, so you can correct it and import again. And importing a birthday does not opt anybody into marketing, so imported customers who never consented still get no gift email.

The two columns to use: birth_month and birth_day

Put the birthday in two separate columns of plain whole numbers, birth_month (1 to 12) and birth_day. That is exactly what a Brainerce export writes, so the safest file to import is one you exported and edited.

Two columns instead of one date column is deliberate. Excel and Google Sheets quietly retype a cell like 04-17 into a date and write it back reformatted, which is the same data loss one layer down.

Both numbers have to be there. A row with a month and no day, or a day and no month, has no usable birthday and will never earn a gift.

The day has to exist in that month. 29 February is accepted, and is celebrated on 28 February in non-leap years. 30 February is refused, because there is no such day.

One combined date column, and why day-first dates get refused

A single combined column is also read, under any of these headers: birthday, birth_date, birthdate, date_of_birth or dob. It can hold MM-DD, MM/DD, YYYY-MM-DD or a full date. Any year in it is read and then thrown away, because only the month and the day are ever stored.

Day-first dates are refused rather than guessed at. Brainerce refuses any full date whose day could just as easily be read as a month, instead of choosing between 4 May and 5 April, because choosing wrong sends the gift on the wrong day. A file written in the day-first order most of Europe uses hits this on a large share of its rows.

A date with no year is always read month first. In a two part cell, 04-17 is 17 April. 17-04 is not 17 April, it is month 17, so it is refused. This catches day-first files even where the numbers look unambiguous to a person.

For either problem the answer is the same: give the file the two birth_month and birth_day columns instead. A refused date never fails the row. The customer imports without a birthday, and the import preview warns you which cell to fix.

Ask for a birthday at sign-up

You can require a birthday when someone creates an account on your storefront. The setting is Require Birthday in that storefront's sales-channel settings, directly under Require email verification, and it is off by default.

Read the limits before you switch it on, because they are narrow:

• It only affects new sign-ups. Customers who already have an account are never asked. Nothing goes back and collects the birthdays you missed, and Brainerce sends no email asking an existing customer for one.
• It only applies to storefronts connected as a sales channel. A storefront that connects with a plain store ID has no sales channel to read the setting from, so the birthday stays optional there however you set the switch. This is exactly the same limitation Require email verification has.
• It only covers email and password sign-up. "Continue with Google" and the other social sign-ins create the account on a different route that never looks at this setting, and neither does an ordinary guest checkout. So a storefront with the toggle on has a gated password form sitting next to an ungated social button, and customers keep arriving without a birthday. Never build reporting on the assumption that every new customer has one.
• It is still month and day only. No year, so it is not an age check and cannot gate anything by age.
• A birthday collected at sign-up earns a gift email only if that customer also accepted marketing.

Email everyone whose birthday is this month, or on one date

The automatic gift is one email per customer, sent a set number of days ahead. For a separate one-off promotion aimed at the month's birthdays, the short way is the Birthdays this month card on Customers → Campaigns: press it and the email opens with that audience already chosen, with a live count of how many customers it matches. No filtering, and nothing to set up. See Email campaigns.

The longer route still works and is the one to use when you want a single date rather than the whole month, because the card covers the month only. Open Filter on the Customers list, choose the month under Birthday month, then start a campaign from that filter: a campaign started from the Customers list takes whatever the list is filtered to as its audience.

Turn on Birthday day in the same Filter menu to narrow that to a single date, such as 17 April, which is what you want for a greeting that goes out on the day itself. Both filters are off until you switch them on in the Filter menu, and each customer's birthday is shown in the Birthday column of the list so you can check who is in it before sending. Set the day on its own and it means that day in every month, which is rarely what anyone wants.

Either way, you can send it the moment you confirm, or schedule it on the confirmation step for the morning you want it read, up to 90 days ahead in your store's time zone. The audience is worked out again at send time, so a campaign filtered to a single birthday date still reaches exactly the people with that birthday, including anyone who joined after you booked it. See Can I schedule a campaign to send later?.

That campaign is an ordinary marketing email, so the ordinary rules apply: only customers who accepted marketing are mailed, and nothing sends at all until your business postal address is set.

The gift coupon never expires

Send (days before) decides when the email goes out. It does not put a time limit on the gift, and nothing else does either.

• The coupon has no expiry date. None is set when it is minted, and there is no field, on the reward or on the coupon afterwards, for you to add one. A gift sent for a customer's birthday in March is still redeemable years later.
• It is locked to that customer. The code works only for the person whose birthday it was. Forwarding it to a friend does nothing, so a birthday code that leaks is not an incident.
• It can be used once.

Plan for the liability. You are minting a permanent discount for every consenting customer with a birthday on file, every year, and the unredeemed ones never fall off your books. The only guard available is Minimum order on the reward you chose as the gift. It cannot expire the coupon, but it does stop the discount being claimed against a trivial basket.

If you want a real deadline, it has to be a claim you make in the email copy ("redeem within 14 days"), and you should know that Brainerce will not enforce it. Customers who redeem late will succeed, and support will hear about it if your copy said otherwise.

Good to know

• Once a year, guaranteed. A customer can never receive two birthday gifts for the same birthday, even if their date sits inside the window for several nights.
• Marketing consent is respected, so only customers who accepted marketing emails receive the gift.
• February 29 birthdays are handled: in non-leap years they're celebrated on February 28.
• The email only goes to customers who actually provided a birthday, so the more your storefront encourages filling it in ("add your birthday, get a gift 🎁"), the more this feature does.
• A birthday you typed in or imported counts exactly the same as one the customer entered themselves. The gift still requires their marketing consent.

Storefront requirement

Collecting the birthday is one profile field (month and day, no year) on your storefront's account page. Your storefront can also read the saved birthday back and show it, so a customer who already filled it in sees it there instead of an empty box, and it can ask for the birthday on the sign-up form as well. Developers: see the integration guide.

You are not dependent on the storefront for this. A birthday you type into the customer record, or import from a file, works exactly the same and earns the same gift email, as long as that customer accepted marketing.