How to Create Birthday Campaigns

There are two ways to create a new Reminder Campaign:

By clicking Create Birthday Campaign to begin a completely new campaign.
By clicking the Copy button to the right of an existing campaign. This is best if you want to a head start on creating the campaign using some pre-existing settings for an existing campaign that you only need to modify slightly. A good use of this is creating a text campaign from an otherwise identical email campaign, and vice versa.

Birthday Campaign Creation – Step by Step

To create a basic Birthday Campaign:

Click Create Birthday Campaign to open the Create Birthday Campaign dialog.

Note: Refer to this diagram below for all step-number references:

Give your Birthday Campaign a descriptive name. InTouch accepts long names, so you can generally be as specific as you need to be with naming.
Set the status to ON or OFF, depending on your schedule for beginning this campaign. Status of ON enables this campaign to run in accordance with the schedule you created; OFF keeps the campaign disabled until you are ready to use it.
Set the target gender for this campaign: Male, Female, or Both.
Set the campaign to send emails and/or text messages. (In this example it is just Email.)
From the dropdown list, select the template you want to use. (Note that when using InTouch for the first time there will only be one template, the Default Birthday Template.)
Click Preview to see how this email will appear when using the selected template (see below). The default Reminder template may prove be sufficient for your needs.
Editing the template is an optional step. If the default Reminder template is not completely sufficient for your Reminder 1 message, you can edit the template as needed. See Email Template Editing – a Quick Guide, below.
Select when, in relation to patients' birthdays, you want the message to be sent. Note that this defaults to "On Their Birthday", but you can choose among several selections from 30 days before to 30 days after.
Select the time of day you want the message to be sent.
Once you are satisfied with the design of your campaign, click Save to save the campaign and close the dialog.

Preview Email

You should preview your messages whenever creating or editing a campaign. You can also take it one step further by sending a test email to yourself. Note that when previewing a message, InTouch substitutes in sample data for some of the variables you are using:

Email Template Editing – a Quick Guide

You can quickly check your selected template as follows:

Ensure that the basic information is correct: Template Name, From, Subject, and Email address.
Ensure that the Status is Active.
Ensure that the Type is set to Birthday. This is so the template will be made available for use in Birthday campaigns.
Review the body of the message and make any wording changes necessary. You can also change the style of the wording, font, size, and so forth.
Use the Variables dropdown selection to insert any additional variables necessary. When the email is generated the appropriate values will be swapped in at these locations.
If you would like an image in the emails, such as your company logo, to appear, place the cursor where you want the image to go and click Insert Image.
Once finished, click Preview to preview the results. If have made changes and you're satisfied with the look, click Save.

Reminder Texts

The scheduling for birthday texts is the same in principle as birthday emails, but the template will be more simple.

Guide to creating a birthday text template:

Give the reminder text template a descriptive name.
Set the status.
Set the type to Birthday.
Write a simple, polite birthday message that gets to the point. Note that there is a 160-character limit, after which the cost of each text will double.
Use the variables for info that needs to be message specific.
When finished, you can preview the text message and if desired send a test message as well using the Preview screen. When satisfied, click Save.