Birthdays: the easiest high-response campaign you will ever run

Birthday campaigns consistently produce the highest open and redemption rates of any automated restaurant message, for the obvious reason that the recipient is the subject. They are also close to free to run once set up, and most pizza shops either do not run one or run one that gives away a single pizza to a single person.

Sell the occasion, not the individual

A birthday is a gathering. An offer built for one person, a free personal pizza, captures a fraction of the available occasion. An offer built for a group brings four people through the door and produces a ticket several times larger.

The structure that works: something genuinely free for the birthday person, conditional on a group-sized order. Everyone feels looked after, the ticket is healthy, and you have introduced your food to several people who may not be customers.

Timing and window

Collecting the date without losing the signup

Asking for a full date of birth at signup depresses completion and raises privacy concerns. Ask for the day and month only, which is all the campaign needs, and ask for it after the customer has already joined rather than as part of the initial form.

A post-signup message, "tell us your birthday and we will do something about it", collects the date from a meaningful share of members without adding a field to the form that costs you enrolments.

The anniversary nobody uses

The anniversary of a customer’s first order is a genuinely under-used trigger. It reaches people whose birthday you never captured, it works for every customer without any additional data collection, and the message writes itself: a year ago today you ordered from us for the first time.

It performs particularly well as a retention touch for customers whose frequency has softened, because it arrives as recognition rather than as a promotion.

You already know the date of every customer's first order. That is a free birthday for everyone who never gave you a real one.

Questions