There may be a time when you want to send out an email campaign to your contacts based on a certain date - such as a birthday, anniversary, or when they joined your list. You can send relative to a contact's date field with a date based campaign. This type of campaign can be sent to your contacts on, before, or after any date field that you specify. The field can be a custom date field that you create or a system default field, such as a list subscription date.
If you wish to send your contacts a series of emails based on a certain date, such as an event, you will want to use a date based automation. Similar to the date based campaign, using a date-based automation will allow you to begin a series of chained actions that is triggered by a date (rather than just sending a single campaign relative to a date).
To create a date based campaign:
Click on “New Campaign” from the “Campaigns” page. You'll want to give your campaign a name and then click on “Date Based.”
You'll then want to follow the prompts to select your list and pick your template. Once you are done modifying your template, click “Next,” and you will be taken to the “Campaign Summary” page.
On the summary page, you'll be able to schedule the email to send on, before, or after your preferred date field. For instance, you can schedule a campaign to go out 1 day before a birthdate, or, 1 year after a subscription date.
Once you have selected when it will go out, you will then need to select which date field you want to base this campaign on and then program the campaign to run yearly (recurring campaign) or once only. Recurring campaigns would be used for birthdays or anniversaries and the one time option can be used for an event, such as a wedding.
When finished, click on the “Finish” button on the top right. Your campaign will now go out to contacts as they meet your date requirement at 12 noon CST.