6 Ways to Ask People Their Birthday

By Melvin Ram - Discuss Online

Birthdays 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 someone's 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 someone's birthday:

 

1. 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 birthdays of a few different people you know.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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 spouse's birthday.
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
6. 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 it's 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?

~ Mel

Direct: (916) 743-9369
Email: melvin@volcanicmarketing.com

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Melvin Ram is the President & CEO of Volcanic Internet Marketing.

Volcanic clients outsmart their competition using email marketing, building stronger relationships, search engine marketing, website design, sales presentation development and website maintenance.

For more information on Volcanic, please visit www.volcanicmarketing.com.
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