6 Ways to Ask People Their Birthday
By Melvin Ram - July 25th, 2007
Birthday’s are great for building relationships. Why? Because almost no one remembers birthdays. When you remember someone’s birthday, you’ll usually get put into a special category of people. If you do this consistently, you form a special bond over a few years.
However, in order to remember someones birthday, you have to know their birthday. So how do you find out the birthdays of people you know?
Here are 6 ways I have used in the past to find out someones birthday:
- Use Plaxo - What is Plaxo? Plaxo is a way to keep the information in your address book always up to date & accurate. Here’s how it works: Once you import your contacts into Plaxo, you can send people a request to update their contact info. Your contacts will get an email with asking for updated information. They’ll click on the link in the email and update their information. How does this help with finding out birthdays? There is a field to enter their birthday (with or without the specific year) and a lot of people fill this out. Best of all, Plaxo is free of charge for it’s basic service and their premium service is awesome.
- Ask Someone Who Knows - Do you know the office manager/wife/husband/sister/brother of your contact? Use email, SMS & phone calls to ask people the birthdays of other people. The officer manager may even have the birthday’s of a few different people you know.
- Just Ask Them - Just ask straight out: “Hey when is your birthday?”. You can do it through email, SMS, on a phone call or in person. I like email. On the phone & in person, I like to ask them towards the end of a conversation. Don’t make it a big deal. It’s a simple question, looking for a simple answer. You will get people who will ask you “Why are you asking?” I just tell them that I like to call people on their birthday.
- Make it part of a form - If you have an agreement or form that most of your clients have to complete in order to do business with you, add Date of Birth as a field into that form. People will fill it out without thinking twice about it. This is the reason Plaxo works so well.
- Pay Attention - If you pay attention to people, you’ll sooner or later discover their birthday. Just today I discovered someone’s birthday because I went onto their blog. I often ask people what they did over the weekend and many times I find out it was their birthday or their spouses birthday.
- Create a FaceBook account & invite people - The cool thing about FaceBook.com is that you can share so many intimate things like photos, videos and more. The feature I love the most is that it asks people their date of birth right in the beginning and publishes the day & month by default. Again, it works like Plaxo. People fill it out because its part of a form. So invite people to Facebook. You get to share things with them… and you get their birthday
What are the ways you’ve found to be most effective in discovering birthdays? Leave a comment below.
~ mel
Melvin Ram
CEO, Volcanic Internet Marketing
Direct: (916) 743 9369
Email: melvin@volcanicmarketing.com
2,725 Views
July 27th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Melvin - I see from Facebook that you had a birthday this month. Happy (belated) Birthday!
Depending on one’s business, the long-standing practice of “Birthday Clubs” can be an effective way to keep in touch in the B2C world. A restaurant could offer a free burger. Our local toy store offers a shoe-box full of little trinket toys to birthday club members.
You make a good point about the way Plaxo does not require year - many people are probably reluctant to give their birthday because they don’t want others to know their age. Making the year optional takes care of that concern.
July 31st, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I go with step three, just ask them, but I only ask for the day and the month, they are so much more forth coming with that! The year isn’t relevet and is also the bone of contention for many, unless its a child and then it nice to know what age birthday they are having. Young people are also proud of their age and will happily give you the year. Once people get over 28 they are more reluctant.
A good reminder system just needs the day and month if they are all loaded in as 2007, it doesn’t matter. I also use Plaxo as my reminder system and extensively use the Plaxo card system to send a email card out to everyone having a birthday. Plaxo gives me a 7 day reminder in advance.
A person birthday is the most important day of the whole year to them, get that right and you will surely impress them. And of course once you have a birthdate its good for the rest of their life!
July 31st, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Mel,
Oddly enough, I sometimes find out birthdays when people casually mention their horoscope or make comments like “I’m such a Taurus.” Then I usually ask, “When is that again?” or “Oh, when is your birthday?” They are quick to pop the date right out and then tell me all the unique qualities of themselves, most of their family members, co-workers, and anyone else they have birthday information on.
It also comes out a lot when eating at a Chinese restaurant where they have those place mats with the Chinese horoscopes on them. The trick is to remember it later and get it into your database.
Tania