Overview

You've worked hard to establish your email list, and you want your subscribers to know how much you appreciate them. Of course, you send out regular promos and newsletters, but if you're trying to find a more creative approach to reach potential customers, anniversary emails are one way you can personally connect with your email list. 

These might be a simple note to express your appreciation or an attempt to create conversions, but one important thing can make or break this campaign: Personalization.

Email personalization is a critical component of your marketing strategy. Even if you're sending an automated, mass email, including something like your subscriber's name can make a significant difference in whether they open, click, or convert from your campaign. This approach also results in:

• Increased open rates. Did you know that an email subject line that features personalization is 26% more likely to be opened than an email without the added personal touch? A name is a good start, but consider using other attributes, like something you know they like.
• Revenue increase. Email personalization can result in a 20% increase to sales revenue when compared to campaigns without that extra effort. This makes your emails more effective, and improves your email marketing ROI (which is huge if you need to be strategic).

Anniversary emails are just one example of incorporating email personalization in your marketing campaigns, but they're a great time to remind your customers why they signed up for your email list in the first place. These might include birthdays, purchase anniversaries, and key milestones like newsletter subscription or app download.

Use Case

Sending anniversary campaigns in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a great way to increase customer engagement (and an easy way to add personalization to your campaigns). On these special occasions, you might want to:

• Send exclusive content 📹
• Offer product discounts 🫰
• Send gifts 🎁Ž
• Reflect on progress ◀️

For example, Uber sends emails for the anniversary of a user's first Uber ride, and also includes metrics like rider rating and number of compliments received. All of this customer data lives inside your data warehouse, and is easily accessible using a data activation tool like Census. 

Here's how you can get started in 3 easy steps:

1. Connect your data source. This can be a data warehouse like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks. Or a database like Postgres, SQL Server, or MySQL
2. Connect your destination application, like Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
3. Map fields to sync customer data. You can even use a custom audience list created in Census Segments.