Okay, so you get the importance of sending birthday cards to your clients, prospects, referral sources and all that but you don’t have anyone’s actual birthday in your database. You’d love to get started but you feel stymied. Well, here’s a way to solve that problem so you can start right now, retrieve a lot of the birthdays of your existing contact database, give the card recipients a laugh and perhaps have them think you’re a pretty clever marketer.
Send an un-birthday card. Send cards to anyone in your contact list for whom you don’t have a birth date and say something like, “Well, I’d really like to send you a birthday card, but I don’t know when it is. So here’s the deal. If today really is your birthday, then woohoo, PAR-TEE! If your birthday was some time in the last six months, I’m sorry I missed it but I won’t miss it again if you send the month and day of your birthday – that way I can be sure to send a card next year. And, if your birthday is coming up in the next six months, well, you get an extra card – or you could just consider this one somewhat to really early. But please send me your birth day and month, too, so I can be more timely next year.”
Now, you probably don’t want to use those exact words, but you could if you’d like. The idea is to make it personal, make it perhaps a bit humorous and keep the focus on getting their birthday date.
And in the meantime, you’ve sent a card that touches on a personal matter, revealed some of your own personality to them, and overall made the point that you intend to continue valuing them and working on the relationship.
You could send these cards to everyone on your list at once, or divide list into twelve equal groups and send 1/12th of the cards each month, or send one a day. The point is you can start sending birthday cards even when you don’t know people’s birthdays.
