An autoresponder can be triggered based on dates saved in your mailing list custom columns. For example, you might use Direct Mail's custom columns to hold the birthday for each of your subscribers. You could use a date-based autoresponder to send each subscriber an email before, during, or after their birthday. Another example would be sending customers an account renewal reminder a few days or weeks before their subscription is set to expire.
If you use this trigger, you'll select which custom column holds the dates that trigger the autoresponder. Dates must be formatted in a way that Direct Mail understands, specifically:
Year-Month-Day
- Year: Can be four digits or two, or can be left off entirely
- Month: Can be one or two digits
- Day: Can be one or two digits
Here are some examples of valid dates:
2015-1-12represents 12 January 201582-4-3represents 3 April 198210-1represents 1 October any year
Four-digit years are preferred. If you are using two-digit years, then numbers less than or equal to 29 are interpreted as 21st century (e.g. 2029) and numbers greater than or equal to 30 are interpreted as 20th century (e.g. 1930).
Leading or trailing spaces in the date columns are okay.
If you use this trigger, you'll also select if and how often you want the autoresponder to repeat. For example, you'd probably want a birthday autoresponder to repeat every year. Date-based autoresponders can be set to repeat
- Never (they only send on the date indicated)
- Monthly (they send every month on the day indicated)
- Annually (they send every year on the month and date indicated)
Autoresponders that repeat monthly will automatically compensate for months that have fewer than 31 or 30 days.
Date-based autoresponders have additional flexibility in scheduling when the message is sent. You can choose to send the message before the trigger date, and you can also choose which time of day you'd like the message to be sent. Time of day is relative to the sender's (i.e. your) time zone.