Sending a birthday email across timezones?

[Guitarrista82]

Hi everyone,

This might be a dumb question but I want to run it by others here before forging ahead.

We send a birthday email to all employees on the day of their birthday. 

The logic we use is simple:

The only problem is that because the campaign is based on my local time (MST), for our India employees, the email is getting to them the day after their birthday.

The fix I'm thinking of for our India employees is to set up a new, separate campaign for them using this SL logic:

Any reason why this wouldn't work?

Thank you!

LK

[Darshil_Shah1]

A couple of caveats here to be aware of here - 

"In future" operator would let people who have their date value in the next 1 day from today (today refers to the day as per MST) qualify. IMO, there's a chance for the person who was sent the email from the last send to be included in the campaign for today as well. Since per their value in the date field, they would still qualify for "in future" 1 day from today. Additionally, the "Country" field needs to be accurately populated.

Edit: Above is how the "in future" operator works, but as Sandy notes, this is not the correct way to send the birthday email in the first place

[Guitarrista82]

Ah, good point Darshil.

I do know that the email program can send emails based on recipients' timezone, but we would have to create 30 programs each month to send one Happy Birthday email, which doesn't make sense.

Any potential workarounds/solutions?

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

One solution would be to update the campaign's qualification rules to allow qualifying people to flow through the campaign once every 364 days. Creating separate email programs for each day doesn't make sense for this use case; instead, you can set a single campaign's configuration in a way that people who have a birthdate in the future one day qualify but don't qualify for the next day's run. Make sure to suppress people with Country = India from your original campaign; otherwise, people in India would receive emails from both campaigns.

You should check out this blog which explains a couple of different ways of setting the birthday email - 1st method uses the in-tact birthdate field (with the year same as the actual birth year of a person) and 2nd method is similar to yours whereas in the year in the birthdate is updated to match the current year.

[Guitarrista82]

Thanks Darshil! I will take a look.

I appreciate your help!

LK

[SanfordWhiteman]

You're right to wonder about this! I've noted before that to humans, dates like birthdays have implicit time zones, even if on a technical level they're treated as time-free (and thus timezone-free).

However, think we need to step back. Sending to people whose Date of Birth = today isn't a birthday email. It's literally sending to people who were born today.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Great catch - I got into the rabbit hole of how the operators function and missed that this is a birthday email in the first place!

[Guitarrista82]

Hi Sanford,

To clarify, we use a field Date of Birth and set it to their birth day + this year's date.

Then, in the SL it looks for people whose "Date of Birth" is Today and send them the email.

 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, that's quite confusing because the system field Date of Birth is supposed to be the day they were born. I could see using another field like Next Birthday but not repurposing a field with an existing meaning. Exactly how are you setting it to "their birth day + this year's date"? That's not clear to me.

In any case if you're managing another field, it should be a datetime. That way you can send at, say, 9am in the person's timezone.

[Guitarrista82]

I'm not sure the reasoning behind why the Date of Birth field was used and another field wasn't created. I imagine there was a request from another department and this was a quick solution that made sense at the time.

As far as how the field is set to birth day + this year's date, it happens in two ways:

1. There is data sync with our CRM that populates that field with their birth date using the current year.

2. I import a list each month in which I have manually set their date of birth.