Staying in touch with clients throughout the year doesn’t need to be time-consuming. With Tern’s prebuilt “Client Care” workflow, you can automatically send personalized emails for birthdays, anniversaries, and upcoming passport expirations.
Here’s how to get everything set up.
Use a Prebuilt Workflow Template
To make setup fast and easy, Tern has published a Client Care workflow in the Tern Community. You can copy it directly into your workspace.
From your Dashboard, go to the Library tab.
Click into Workflows.
Find and open the Client Care workflow in the Tern Community.
Select Make a copy. This will add it to your own list of workflows so you can make edits.
This template includes three automations:
A birthday email sent on the client’s birthday
A passport expiration reminder sent 200 days in advance
An anniversary message sent on the client’s anniversary date
Customize the Email Content
Each email comes with a default message, but you can easily make changes to fit your brand.
To customize an email:
Open one of the automations (for example, “Passport Expiration Reminder”).
Turn the automation off to enable editing.
Edit the email subject, body, and any images or links.
When you’re finished, toggle it on again.
Repeat this process for the birthday and anniversary messages. You can leave the default content as-is or personalize it to reflect your tone, brand, or preferred messaging.
You can also add more reminders (e.g., 100 days or 20 days before a passport expires) by duplicating the passport automation and adjusting the trigger timing.
Enable Auto-Apply for New Contacts
To automatically apply this workflow to new contacts as they’re created:
Open your copied workflow and click Edit Settings.
Under Apply Trigger, select When contact is created.
Turn on Auto-Apply.
Now, anytime you add a new contact with an email address and relevant dates (birthday, anniversary, passport expiration), those automations will be added automatically and run on schedule.
Apply to Existing Contacts
If you want your current contacts to receive these reminders:
Open the workflow and click Bulk Apply.
Choose to apply it to all contacts, or just those with a specific tag.
Confirm the action to add the workflow to each selected contact.
If you later update the workflow (e.g., change the message or add more reminders), use the Apply Updates button to push those changes to every contact who already has the workflow applied.
Confirm Automations Are Working
To make sure everything is set up correctly:
Create a new contact and include an email, birthday, anniversary date, and passport expiration date.
Save the contact.
Navigate to the Automations section of their contact record and verify that all three automations are active with scheduled trigger dates.
If any dates are missing, the corresponding email won’t be scheduled until those fields are completed.