Asking your contacts to update their details is a great way to get up to date information on them. A common use of this is to ask guests to add their birthdate if they don't one in your database.

In this example, we'll be setting up an email to check your database each day to see if there are any contacts that were created 180 days ago that don't have a date of birth listed.

Before you setup the automation, you'll need to create a form with an Email field and Date of Birth field. For help setting up forms, check out the article Forms Overview.

1. Once logged in to your account, select the + button and choose Create an automation
2. Select Blank Automation
3. In the right hand menu, select the arrow next to Triggers to expand the section.
4. Scroll down until you see Day/Time and drag it into the Trigger area on the left side of the page
5. Set up the time you want the email to be sent - in the example below we've selected 10am.
6. Leave the rest as is and click Save.
   
7. Select the arrow next to Criteria to bring up the list of criteria
8. Drag Contact Field over to the Trigger Criteria/Action area.
9. Select the first field and select Created
10. Select the second field and select was x days ago and then enter 180 in the third field.
    
11. Drag another Contact Field under the Yes option of the first Contact Field criteria
12. Select the first field and select Date of Birth
13. Select the second field and select is empty.
    
14. Go to the actions section and drag email over to the left hand side of the page under the Yes arrow.
15. Set the subject to something friendly and meaningful, and type in the email address you'd like your customers to see when they receive the email, as well as you or your company's name.
16. Leave the Reply to field blank and Frequency to Always Send.
17. Ensure the Ignore Opt-out status if unchecked.
18. Select an existing template or build one yourself. Ensure that whichever template you choose includes a form that asks for a Date of Birth and Email so that the contacts details will be updated. Save the template to a new campaign folder called 'Update Details Automations'.
    
19. Your final automation should look like this:
    

Common Modifiers

Run this campaign once a year

The way the example automation is set up, contacts will only get reminded once. You can instead set it up so that a contact gets sent a timely reminder to fill out a form. In this example we can set it up so the reminder gets sent once a year, but you can set it to any frequency you'd like.

1. Edit the Day/Time trigger with a specific date
   
2. Remove the "Created date" Contact Field criteria and leave only the "DOB is empty" Contact Field criteria
3. Your automation should look like this:
   

Ask for birthday in a Welcome automation

You can also add the form to a Welcome Automation, so that every new contact is asked when their birthday is.

Ask for other information

This automation can be used to gather other information for your contacts to help you segment your audience and also setup. To do this, just add some additional fields to your form. Some ideas for other information to ask your contacts about:

• Anniversary
• Postcode
• What's your favourite sport?
• Favourite type of drink?