Email Off Birth Date in Custom Object Table

[nhabischWings]

Hello!
I know there's been a million threads about doing an automated yearly birthday email - and I've read through a bunch of them, but I haven't seen a lot of detail on how to integrate the birth date being on a Custom Objects record.

I understand the general principal, but am stuck on two points:

1) Assuming I'm looking to send the email once a year per relevant record and our current Birth Date field is a Date set to YYYY-MM-DD, I almost need to change that to just display the MM-DD since the year does not matter if we're not specifying age?

2) I get that I could use a Velocity script and so forth but the big hiccup I see with the Smart List. If my Date field lives in Custom Objects and I can't (really) use the Lead Table due to the multiple records on a lead thing - how would I go about the Smart List side of things?

My initial goal was to run it as a batch campaign that runs daily - If I switched the Birth Date field to "MM-DD" could I use the "Has xx" Custom Object filter and set "Birth Date In Timeframe = Today"? Or does a date field require the year?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You don’t want to switch the datatype. It must be a Date, and of course the year is required (it’s not just a “time segment” or anything like that).

Impossible to do this using only a Date field on a Custom Object, though. You’re gonna need a Date field on the lead as well.

And you’ll need to do a backfill (using a list import, etc.) for everyone whose birthday already happened this year.

The path for people whose birthday didn’t happen yet:

• set the Date field on all COs to their next birthday, not their actual birth date
• run a batch each day for people whose CO Birth Date is today or whose Lead Next Birthday is today
• for those people, send the birthday email
• set their Lead Next Birthday to {{system.date}} + 1 year

Then your backfill sets the Lead Next Birthday for everyone who would be missed by this process.

It’ll work automatically going forward but sure is cumbersome to set up at first. Would be a lot better to use the Birth Date on the lead!

[nhabischWings]

Got it, that makes sense! I will look into that.

Thank you again for all your help!