Birthday Marketing

Yesterday was my twenty-(umm never mind) birthday. I received e-mails from various websites. At first, I thought it was cool; these sites went out of their way to send me warm wishes on my big day. After some thought on how someone would actually send warm wishes. I realized it was not such a big deal.

Sites store their users in a database. It literally takes one line of SQL to get a list of birthdays.

SELECT NAME, EMAIL_ADDRESS, BIRTHDAY FROM USERS WHERE BIRTHDAY=TODAY;

That is it, one line of code (it’ a little more involved, but not much), enabling the site to send out daily birthday notices. The thought is genuine but the actual effort is minimal.

One site offered me more than an email. Sitepoint.com offered me 10 dollars off their collection of web development books. Even though it expires in 5 days, it’s by far, better than anything else I got.

My question is what’s more important. The effort put into sending the greetings or the thought? Offering 10 dollars to each member when you have 20,000 members is a lot of money to give away. On the other hand, how many people will actually take the offer? I would guess no more than 5 percent, if that.