Adding a customer's date of birth from the Happy Birthday app to their Shopify Customer Profile has always been possible via customer notes or tags, however, you can also choose to add their birth date to a Shopify customer metafield.
Whilst the benefits of doing this may not be that clear just yet, we believe that the zero-party data that we collect on your behalf should be held natively within your Shopify store. Having the full picture when engaging with customers, whether through support or through marketing initiatives, will provide you with the insight you need to build on your relationship with that customer. You don't want to be navigating between apps to work out whether or not a particular customer will be interested in your latest marketing initiative.
What can I do with this data?
At present, if you store the customer's date of birth as a customer tag or note, there's not a great deal you can do to segment your customers by their Birthdate within Shopify.
With a defined customer birthdate metafield, however, a Customer Segment can be created using the value of that metafield.
By creating a Customer Segment using the 'anniversary' filter, customers with birthdates stored in your chosen metafields will enter the segment on the day of their Birthday (or any time before/after depending on how you set-up your filter).
Here is how that segment looks using Shopify's default Customer metafield for storing a customer's birth date:
This can then be paired with the Customer joined segment trigger within a Shopify Marketing Automation to begin a workflow when a customer joins that segment.
In time, we anticipate that Shopify will introduce additional tools to allow merchants to access data stored in customer metafields within marketing automations. This would allow merchants to use a combination of Shopify Marketing Automations and Shopify Email to deliver customised Birthday emails containing unique discount codes.
Please Note:
We can only store a birth date metafield against a Shopify Customer Profile. If a visitor signs up to your Birthday Club but has not previously purchased from your store, it is unlikely that they will have a Shopify Customer Profile in your store.
What are the options?
Shopify provide a default Customer metafield for storing a customer's birth date. The metafield stores the customer's date of birth in ISO 8601 format. A customer can have one birth date on record as part of their customer profile. The reserved namespace and key for this metafield is:
facts.birth_date
If you choose to enable this feature within the Happy Birthday app, we will default the feature to use the Shopify defined birth date metafield, which belongs to the CUSTOMER resource.
You may be using an app that has defined its own birth date metafield that you'd prefer to use, or you may have customised your theme to store a date of birth into your own custom metafield.
If you'd like to continue storing birth dates within your existing metafield, then as long as the Type of that metafield is set to date, we have provided the ability for you to select this metafield from within the features settings.
How to enable this feature
Go to Happy Birthday > Settings scroll down to the Advanced Features section and you'll see a feature called Shopify Metafields.
Click on the Manage button:
Click the checkbox to enable the feature:
We will automatically populate the selected option with the Shopify Birth Date metafield - (facts.birth_date):
If you've already started capturing birth dates within a custom metafield and you'd like to continue to use that metafield, click on the dropdown selector to view your compatible metafields and then select your preferred option:
The example above highlights a metafield that was created by the Customer Fields app.
Whichever metafield you choose, make sure that you then click on the Save Settings button.
That's it!
The next time a member signs up to your Birthday Club, as long as they have a Shopify customer profile in your store, we will automatically add their birth date to the selected customer metafield.
Need any help?
If you would like any advice or support related to storing birth dates in metafields, then please don't hesitate to get in touch.