Hello everyone!

What sets you apart as a sales person is your ability to add that personal touch to your business relationship with your customers. Sending a gift on a special day, or leaving a note wishing them on their birthdays, are small, yet significant actions that show your customers that you care. And these are actions done without any expectations :) You must be engaging with a lot of customers and it is highly unlikely that they all are your friends on Facebook or some social channel, right? How about keeping a tab on their birthdays from your business tool, Zoho CRM? And how about automating greetings just in case you are too pressed for time to leave a personal note? Besides, this reduces the possibility of your missing out wishing some of your clients. Cool, right? Let me just show you a simple hack that lets you automate birthday greetings to your customers!

Here are the steps:

1. Create a birthday wish template:
Go to Settings->Setup->Customization->Templates->Create a template for Leads/Contacts. You have three options to create birthday templates.

2. Create a workflow to automate sending the birthday greetings.

a) Go to Settings->Setup->Workflow rules->Create a rule for Contacts.

b) Define the time and date on which the workflow must be triggered, and pick  the Date of Birth field.

c)Choose the date of execution as  Date of Birth field

d)Set the Execution cycle as Every year.

e) Set the "Which records" to “All records” (Or define specific groups and choose to send birthday wishes to that specific clientele (https://www.zoho.com/crm/help/automation/workflow-rules.html - Locate Set rule criteria)

3. Define an action to trigger emails to customers on their birthdays.

Go to Instant action->Send alerts->Choose the  birthday template just created->Email recipient is “Contact/Lead: email and save the workflow. This automation rule sends greetings to your contacts every year on their birthday. 

4. Personalize emails to important clients by creating a custom view showing upcoming birthdays. This is done using formula fields. Let me walk you through the steps:

1. Go to Setup->Modules->Contacts. Drag and drop a Formula field and paste this in the expression and name it as “Month of Birth” and save the formula.

Month(${Contacts.Date of Birth})

This formula  extracts the month of the date of birth and updates it in this formula field.

Then, drag and drop another formula and paste the below expression and name it as “Day of birth” and save the formula and the layout.

Dayofmonth(${Contacts.Date of Birth})

This formula  extracts the day of the date and updates it in this formula field.

Similarly, consider the above image as reference and create another formula using Dayofmonth(${Contacts.Date of Birth})

2. Go to Contacts module—>List view drop down at the top left—>Create view.

3.  Give the criteria as “If “Month of Birth” is 1 and name this view as January and add Day of Month and Month of birth columns in the view. 

4.Sort the day of month in the ascending order.

Now, all the birthdays that fall in January is listed in this view. Create 11 other views for each month. If you feel the custom views are flooding the drop down, just edit this custom view on the 1st of every month and change the month of birth criteria alone. If you have any queries on this, do leave a comment below. Will be happy to help you with it!