Change a Date Field to a Birthday Field

To change a regular date (MM/DD/YY) field into a birthday (MM/DD) field, you'll create a new field, export your audience and replace the old date information with the new birthday information, and reimport your audience.

In this article, you'll learn how to make this change in your audience.

Create new birthday field

In this step of the process, you'll create a new birthday field. Do not delete your old date field yet, because you'll need it to complete the process.

To add the birthday field to your audience, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
   
2. Click Audience dashboard.
   
3. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
4. Click the Manage Audience drop-down and choose Signup forms.
5. Scroll to the Form builder tile, then click Manage forms.
6. On the add a field tab, click Birthday.
7. On the field settings tab, name your field. Name it something unique, so you can tell it apart from your current date field. You can change it later.
   
8. If you want new subscribers to be able to add their own birthdays, make sure the visible button is marked. To hide it, click hidden.
9. Click Save Field.

Export your audience

To export your audience, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
   
2. Click All contacts.
   
3. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
4. Click Export Audience.
   
5. After the export is finished processing, click Export as CSV to download a copy of your audience.

The file is packaged as a ZIP, so you'll have to unarchive the file before you can open it in your preferred spreadsheet program.

Replace old data with new data

Date formats can be tricky, so check your documentation if you have trouble. If you use Excel, here's their date format help article.

To replace the data in your spreadsheet with formatting or by hand, follow these steps. In both examples, you'll create a duplicate birthday field column, but do not delete the old date column yet.

Change date column format

1. Open your CSV export file in your preferred spreadsheet program.
2. Duplicate your original date column, so you can edit it. If you're using column labels, label it what you named the birthday field in Mailchimp.
3. Highlight the new birthday column and open the formatting options.
4. Look for the Numbers or Date formatting options, and change the format of this column from MM/DD/YY to MM/DD.
5. Verify that the data looks the way you want it and save your CSV.

Change date column data manually

1. Open your CSV export file in your preferred spreadsheet program.
2. Duplicate your original date column, so you can edit it. If you're using column labels, label it what you named the birthday field in Mailchimp.
3. Prepare a column in the CSV with the new birthday field data by deleting the years from each entry, so it matches the format MM/DD.
4. Verify the data looks the way you want it and save your CSV.

Update your Mailchimp audience

Perform an auto-update import to place the new birthday field in your audience. Match the CSV's birthday column with the new birthday field in your audience. On the You're all set to import screen, be sure to check the Auto-update my existing list checkbox.

After the import is done, view your audience contact table to check your new birthday field, and then delete the old field. Now you can set up a birthday automation to send automatic birthday emails to subscribed contacts.