How to Create an Epic Birthday Flow

Most Birthday Flow’s deliver a coupon code to customers on the day of their birthday and use it as a mechanism to drive sales.

I’ve got no issue with this except that it’s heavily skewed to the company’s interests.

But if you want to craft an epic customer journey, you need to think outside of the box in how you approach birthdays.

Through the collection of zero-party data and by collaborating with the in-house customer experience team, I’m going to show you how to create an epic Birthday Flow in Klaviyo.

Step 1: Configure the date-based property

Your first step is to create a date-based property inside Klaviyo that allows you to start collecting birthdays as custom properties from your customers.

Step 2: Collect Zero-party data

Your next task is to start collecting customer birthdays. There are two primary methods you can use to achieve this:

Signup forms
Progressively profiling existing customers by encouraging them to update their preferences

Here’s an example of a Signup Form that targets returning customers to the site to collect Birthdays:

How to Create an Epic Birthday Flow | Magnet Monster

However, rather than stop here, we’ve decided to create a multistep form for this client which encourages the collection of more data on the next page:

This is then added as custom properties to the customer inside Klaviyo and will start to populate their profile like below:

But it’s not just with pop-ups that you can collect zero-party data from existing subscribers.

You can also progressively profile customers in campaigns to update their preferences:

When they click on the button, it will redirect them to the preference centre in Klaviyo where they can update the custom property and provide their birthday to the brand.

Why are we asking the customer for their favourite drinks, snacks and book genre, I hear you ask?

This will be revealed shortly ;-)

Step 3: Create a Date-Based Flow

Now that you’ve set the date-based property and implemented mechanisms to capture that zero-party data, you’re going to want to create a Date-Based Flow that takes advantage of it.

Simply pick the “Date Property” trigger when you create a new flow inside Klaviyo.

Then in the dropdown menu, select the Birthday property:

For our epic Birthday Flow, we’re actually going to want to adjust the default settings above to trigger the flow at least 2 weeks before the customer’s birthday.

I’ll explain why in a second.

Step 4: Set up Internal Notifications

We’re now going to set up Notifications inside Klaviyo and sync them to the customer service team the brand uses.

The notification in this flow is going to be sent to the customer service team within the brand to send a gift to the customer for their birthday.

We’ll do this by leveraging the zero-party data we collected in Step 2 of this guide.

Here’s an example of how this looks inside the flow:

When the brand receives this, it’s then on their desk with all the relevant customer data so that they can prepare a gift to send to the customer ahead of their birthday.

Pretty cool, right?

I’ve written before about how Notifications in Klaviyo are one of the most powerful and underused features of the software.

Step 5: Implement the Flow

Let’s put it all together and create an epic Birthday Flow that surprises and delights the customer.

You can of course deliver a coupon code to the customer on their birthday still (as it does in this flow example), but using the Notification inside the flow, we’re able to really leverage the power of experiential email marketing and deliver an epic customer experience.

Imagine the Word of Mouth marketing that comes with this flow when your customer receives a gift like this on their birthday?!

Conclusion: Get creative with custom properties

Everybody is talking about ‘zero-party data’ at the moment, but there aren’t many practical examples of how to leverage it in email marketing.

The above is straightforward to set up and hopefully provides a glimpse into how some basic creativity can make email a truly experiential channel rather than just one-way sales communications.

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