Celebrating a customer’s birthday in your online store takes three things. The first is an accurate date that the customer chose to share; the second is a short, personal message that goes out on the day itself. The third is optional: a gift whose validity period and conditions are set from the start. You can automate the sending with a tool, but two decisions have to be made in advance: how you will obtain consent, and how much the gift will cut into your profit.
You can decide where to ask for the date of birth and under what consent, on which day and at what time the greeting goes out, and whether the offer should be a discount, a gift voucher or free shipping. You can also adapt the four sample greetings straight away and use a small control group to measure whether the campaign really brings in extra sales.
Ask for the date of birth in the right place and get message consent separately
The most natural place to ask for the date is the sign-up form. Do not make the field mandatory; nobody who wants to register should abandon the form for that reason alone. Right below the field, explain in one sentence why you are asking: “We ask so that we can celebrate your birthday.” If you plan to give a gift, say so clearly as well: “We’ll send you a discount code on your birthday.” Visitors who know what they are giving the date for may be more willing to fill in the field, and it is clear from the outset where the information will be used.
Be careful about which information you ask for, too. The day and month are enough for a greeting. Ask for the year only if you will treat customers differently by age: you need it to avoid sending marketing messages to minors, or to leave out age groups that do not fit your products. Keeping marketing messages away from minors is a safe choice for most stores; whether to exclude other ages depends on your product range.
Article 4 of KVKK, Türkiye’s Personal Data Protection Law, counts among its principles that personal data must be “relevant, limited and proportionate to the purposes for which they are processed” (Law No. 6698). Asking for a birth year you will not use is hard to square with that principle. Article 10 of the same Law also requires that, when you collect the data, you tell the person who you are, why the data will be processed, who it may be transferred to and why, how and on what legal basis it is collected, and what rights they have under the Law. On the form that contains the date-of-birth field, link to your privacy notice, and make sure the notice names this purpose.
Sharing a date of birth is not the same as agreeing to receive messages. Campaign messages need separate consent. Türkiye’s Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce spells this out in Article 6: recipients can be sent commercial electronic messages “only on condition that their prior consent is obtained.” A greeting without a gift needs this consent too: Article 5 of the Regulation on Commercial Communication and Commercial Electronic Messages extends the consent requirement to messages with content “such as celebrations and good wishes” sent to raise a business’s profile. WhatsApp’s rule is similar: the WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy says you may write to a person only if they gave you their number or username and then confirmed that they wish to receive subsequent messages from you.
Ask for two separate things on the form: the date of birth and consent to campaign messages. Do not treat a filled-in date field as consent to receive messages; add a separate consent checkbox that is not pre-checked. Before the form goes live, review two things with a lawyer: the content of your privacy notice and how consents are recorded in İYS (İleti Yönetim Sistemi), the national system in Türkiye where consent to commercial electronic messages is registered.
Registered customers without a birth date
Some customers who have been members for years may have an empty date field; start by checking how many records actually contain a date. There are three ways to fill in the missing dates: add a field to the account page, show a short invitation on the thank-you page once an order is complete, or ask through a small popup on your site. Whichever you choose, state clearly what you are promising: “If you share your date of birth, we’ll send you a greeting on your birthday.” Do not hint at a gift you do not plan to give. And do not ask for the date in the middle of an order, at the payment step; at that point the customer is focused on finishing the payment.
Pushouse’s WhatsApp birthday module takes the date of birth from the membership record or from a small popup you add to your site. In the greeting it addresses the customer by name, and if you wish, the message can also carry a gift voucher. You also choose the age range the message goes to.
The day and time the greeting goes out
Send the greeting on the morning of the birthday. A greeting that arrives on the day itself can feel more personal than a “your birthday is coming up” message a week earlier. Do not send it at midnight or in the early hours of the morning; for most customers, starting their day with a campaign notification may not be a pleasant surprise. Pick a time such as the start of the workday.
Do not squeeze the gift into a single day. Someone whose birthday falls on a weekday may not find time to shop that day. A validity period of 7 to 14 days from the birthday is a reasonable range to start with. Write the expiry as a specific date, for example “until October 12”; vague phrases such as “for a limited time” tell the customer nothing.
Two calendar cases tend to be overlooked. The first is customers born on February 29: in years when February has 28 days, that date does not exist, and your system may silently skip these customers. Choose either February 28 or March 1 and apply the same one every year. The second is the date format: if you import dates from a spreadsheet, check a few records to make sure 03.04 and 04.03 have not been mixed up. A record with the day and month swapped will have you wishing a customer “happy birthday” on the wrong day.
Each person should receive the greeting once a year. If the same phone number is registered to two separate accounts, the customer may get two greetings, so deduplicate the list by phone number. A second message makes a gesture that should feel personal look automated.
A discount, a gift voucher, free shipping or just a greeting
You do not have to give a gift. If you decide to give one, let your margin and your average order value determine which kind.
As an example, take an average order of 900 Turkish lira (TL) at a 35% gross margin. Your gross profit per order is then 315 TL. Here is how much of that profit three different offers to the same customer would take:
- A 15% discount comes to 135 TL on a 900 TL order and leaves 180 TL of profit. The bigger the cart, the bigger the discount.
- A 100 TL gift voucher valid on purchases of 600 TL or more leaves 215 TL of profit on a 900 TL order. The minimum spend means the gift cannot be used on small carts, and on large carts the cost stays fixed.
- If shipping costs you 70 TL per order, free shipping leaves 245 TL of profit. If your shipping fee is already low, or free above a certain amount, this offer will not mean much to the customer.
These figures are only an example; run the same calculation with your own margin. We explained in detail how to base a discount code decision on profit in the article on whether to give cart abandoners a discount code, and the same reasoning applies to a birthday gift.
The form the code takes matters as well. If you give everyone the same code, such as HAPPYBIRTHDAY, it may start circulating on coupon sites and forums, and someone who is not celebrating a birthday at all can use it too. Personal, single-use codes greatly reduce that risk: once a code has been used, it is no longer valid. In the message, say whether the code works on items that are already discounted and whether it applies to the shipping fee. Article 5 of Law No. 6563 also requires that the conditions for benefiting from promotions such as discounts and gifts be easy to access and “clearly understandable, leaving no room for doubt.”
Before sending, make sure the code actually works. If the code has not yet been created when the message goes out, if its expiry date was set one day too early, or if it cannot be combined with another campaign running on the site, the customer will not see the gift in their cart.
Watch out for timing clashes, too. If the birthday gift is a 10% discount while your site is offering everyone 20% off that same week, the “just for you” gift loses its meaning. During major sale periods, either make the birthday code usable on top of the general discount or give something different, such as a gift voucher instead of a discount.
Do not give every customer the same gift
Your birthday list is a customer group that forms on its own every month, but the people in it are not alike. A member who has never bought anything, a customer who orders five times a year and a former customer who has not been back for a year may all have been born on the same day. Send all three the same offer and you end up giving one of them more than necessary and another too little.
Three groups are enough to start with. For a customer who shops often, a greeting without a gift or a small gesture will do. For a customer who has not visited in a long time, a birthday is a good excuse to invite them back, and a more generous offer can make sense here. For a member who has never placed an order, a gift voucher can be a reason to place the first one. If that member is also getting a separate discount in a first-purchase incentive message the same week, pick one of the two; do not send the same person two discounts back to back.
The customer segmentation guide explains how customer groups are built, and the article on customer groups in campaign messages lists who to keep separate before a campaign.
Four birthday greetings you can adapt
Open the message with the greeting and put the offer second. If the first things the customer sees in the notification are their name and “happy birthday,” they may read the message as a gesture rather than an advertisement. On WhatsApp, even a greeting without a gift counts as a marketing template: Meta’s template categorization guide lists a birthday greeting among its examples of marketing templates for building customer relationships. Choose the category accordingly when you submit the template for approval.
A greeting without a gift
Use it for a loyal customer who already shops often. Even though the message contains no link or code, the consent rule still applies to it; do not leave out the opt-out line here either.
Happy birthday, {{customer name}}! All of us at {{store name}} wish you health and happiness in the year ahead. Thank you for shopping with us. 🎂
If you’d rather not receive these messages, just tap the button below.
A personal discount code
Give the code a line to itself so the customer can easily select and copy it, and keep the expiry date in the same message.
Happy birthday, {{customer name}}! Here’s a little birthday gift from us: 15% off everything, sale items included.
Your code: {{discount code}}
Just enter it in your cart by {{expiry date}}. {{store name}}
To stop receiving campaign messages, tap the button below.
A gift voucher with a minimum spend
The minimum spend keeps the voucher from being used on small carts; state the minimum right next to the voucher amount so the customer is not caught off guard in the cart.
Hi {{customer name}}, happy birthday! Your {{gift amount}} TL birthday gift voucher, valid on purchases of {{minimum spend}} TL or more, is ready.
Your code: {{discount code}}
Your voucher is valid until {{expiry date}}. {{store name}}: {{store link}}
If you don’t want to receive messages, tap the button below.
Free shipping with a category suggestion
If you know which category a customer has shopped in before, point the link to that category rather than the home page.
Happy birthday, {{customer name}}! Your birthday gift is free shipping; just use the code below when you order.
Your code: {{discount code}}
Your favorite {{category name}} products are right here: {{category link}}
Valid until {{expiry date}}. {{store name}}
If you’d rather not receive these messages, just tap the button below.
Form of address, the name field and the opt-out line
Choose one way of addressing customers and stick to it. If your site uses the formal Turkish “siz,” switching suddenly to the informal “sen” in a birthday message can look inconsistent. The samples are written for brands with a casual voice (the “sen” form in Turkish); if you use a formal, corporate voice, rewrite them in the “siz” form. You will find more sample texts for campaign announcements in our WhatsApp campaign message examples.
Check the name field as well. A customer who typed their name in all caps or gave only an initial when signing up will receive “Happy birthday, AYŞE YILMAZ!” or “Happy birthday, A.!” If the name field is empty, the sentence comes out as “Happy birthday, !” Because the messages go out on their own every day, fix the name field once, across the whole list: convert all-caps names to the “Ayşe” form, and prepare a version without a name for records that hold only an initial or nothing at all.
Do not send a greeting to a customer who has opted out. Article 8 of Law No. 6563 gives recipients the right to refuse commercial electronic messages “without giving any reason.” It also obliges you to let customers send that refusal free of charge and without difficulty, and to explain in your message how to do so. The same article requires sending to stop within three business days of the refusal reaching you. If birthday messages go out from one tool and campaign messages from another, check that the opt-out list is up to date in both.
The opt-out line in the samples assumes an opt-out button has been added to the template; in Pushouse’s birthday module, too, a person who wants to leave the list does so with the button in the message. Tell customers only about the opt-out route your system actually processes: the button if the message has one, otherwise the keyword you have set up. If you suggest a keyword that is not processed, a customer who wants to leave will keep receiving messages. Test the opt-out route with your own number before the template goes live.
Measure extra sales with a control group
On its own, the number of codes redeemed is a misleading way to judge a birthday campaign. Some of the customers who used the code would have shopped that month anyway, and the gift they received is a straight loss of profit. What you really need to look at is whether customers who got a birthday message ordered more than those who did not.
The simplest way to see the difference is to set aside a small control group. Each month, hold the message back from about one in ten of the customers with a birthday that month, and send it to the rest. The groups should be split at random; for example, you can put customers whose customer number ends in a particular digit into the control group. Then compare the two groups’ order rates over the 30 days after the birthday.
Say 1,000 of your customers have a birthday in a given month: you messaged 900 and kept 100 in the control group. Of those who got the message, 54 people, or 6%, ordered within 30 days. In the control group the rate was 3% (3 people out of 100). The 3-percentage-point difference amounts to about 27 extra orders among the 900 people who received the message. To work out what the campaign was worth, take the profit from those 27 orders and subtract the total cost of the gifts you gave on orders that used the code, as well as the sending fee for the 900 messages. In a control group of 100, a swing of just a few orders can easily change the result, so look at several months of data together before you decide.
Besides the order rate, three more numbers are useful. The average value of orders placed with the gift shows whether you set the minimum spend at the right level. The number of customers who opt out after the greeting shows how much the message bothers people. The third is the day on which each code is redeemed: by comparing months in which you changed the validity period with months in which you did not, you can find the period that suits your store.
Look at these numbers once a quarter. If the offer or the wording is not giving you the result you expected, change only one of them in the next quarter and compare the two periods. To automate collecting dates and the once-a-year greeting, you can take a look at how the WhatsApp birthday module works.
Your store’s own birthday is a different campaign
Some stores also call the discount they offer everyone on the anniversary of their founding a “birthday campaign.” The logic is completely different. A customer birthday campaign is a personal, automated message that goes out every day only to the customers whose birthday falls on that day. A store anniversary, on the other hand, is a campaign announced once a year, on a set date, to your entire opted-in list, and it is planned like a sale week.
You can use WhatsApp bulk messaging to send the anniversary announcement to customers who have given consent, and adapt the wording from the campaign message examples linked above. If you also want the anniversary code to be visible on your site, you can put it in an element that stays on the side of the page, such as a discount tab.
There is a third option as well: the anniversary of the customer’s first purchase from your store. You can set it up with the order date you already have, without asking for a date of birth, and it gives you a personal occasion for customers who would rather not share their birthday. The WhatsApp purchase anniversary page shows how a celebration tied to the order date is set up.
