There may be a time when you want to send out an email campaign to your contacts based on a certain date such as a birthday, anniversary, or when they joined your list. You can send the campaign relative to a contact's date field with a date-based campaign. This type of campaign can be sent to your contacts on, before, or after any date field that you specify. The field can be a custom date field that you create or a system default field, such as a list subscription date.
If you wish to send your contacts a series of emails based on a certain date, such as an event, you will want to use a date-based automation. Similar to the date-based campaign, using a date-based automation will allow you to begin a series of chained actions that is triggered by a
Create a date-based campaign
- Click “Campaigns” on the left menu.
- Click the “New Campaign” button.
- Type the name of the campaign into the field provided and click “Date Based.”
- Click “Next” to advance to the next screen.
- Follow the prompts to select the list and pick your template.
- Once you are done modifying your template, click “Next.” You will be taken to the “Campaign Summary.”
- On the summary page, you’ll be able to schedule the email to send on, before, or after your preferred date field. To choose from these options, click the “on” hyperlink in the Delivery section.
For instance, you can schedule a campaign to send 1 week after a subscription date:
Note that the hyperlinked words may change based on your selections. You can always click back into the blue, hyperlinked words to make adjustments. - Once you have selected when it will go out, you will then need to select which date field you want to base this campaign on. In this example, I want to send this campaign the day before my contacts birthday yearly, so I have changed the field to “Birthday”:
Note that the Birthday field example is a custom date contact field that would need to be created before this campaign example is sent. Learn more about how to create a custom contact field and choose the "Date" field type to make a custom date contact field. - Next, click “yearly” to reveal a dropdown to program the campaign to run yearly (recurring campaign) or once only. Recurring campaigns would be used for birthdays or anniversaries and the one time option can be used for an event, such as a wedding.
- When finished, click on the “Finish” button on the top right.
Your campaign will now go out to contacts as they meet your date requirement. The send time is dependent on what time zone your account is set to.