This article will outline the steps on how to set-up your Birthday email campaign within MailChimp using their Customer Journey method.
For further reference, MailChimp's own documentation for creating a Customer Journey can be found here: Create a Customer Journey
We recommend that you have set up your Birthday email template within MailChimp before following the steps below. Please see our How to set-up your Birthday email template in MailChimp article for more details.
Requirements for setting up a Customer Journey within Mailchimp
You will need to have a fully functioning MailChimp account on the Essentials plan or above. MailChimp's Free plan will NOT allow the use of their Customer Journeys feature:
You will, of course, also need the Happy Birthday app installed into your Shopify store.
Reminder:
If you've arrived here from our How to set-up your Birthday email template in MailChimp article, then you will likely have already seen the following Integration features section. However, as both the Birthday Discount Link and Generate Discount Page are important features of this integration, their descriptions have once again been included below:
Integration features
Two features of the Happy Birthday and MailChimp integration are the Birthday Discount Link and the Generate Discount Page. You'll find a brief description for each of these below. Click on the links to read a more detailed article for each feature.
What is the Birthday Discount Link?
Having chosen MailChimp to send out your birthday emails, you have the option for Happy Birthday to auto-generate a unique birthday discount code for each member of your Birthday Club.
When this feature is enabled, rather than creating a discount code for each new member that joins your Birthday Club, a unique Birthday Discount Link will be generated instead. That link will then be pushed, along with other new Birthday Club member details, into MailChimp ready for inclusion into your birthday email template.
What is the Generate Discount Page?
The Generate Discount Page is a unique landing page that is enabled for each of your Birthday Club members. It is the page that your Birthday Club members will be sent to when clicking on the link within their Birthday Email. This is a dynamic page that the Happy Birthday app creates in your Shopify store, known as a proxy page.
Creating the Customer Journey
Steps:
1. Navigate to Automations:
2. Click the Create Journey button:
3. Enter a Name for the journey. If you have more than one MailChimp audience, then you will also be prompted to select the Audience name. Click the Start Building button:
4. You will then be asked to choose a Starting Point for the Journey:
Briefly stepping forward in time... this is how the finished Customer Journey will look:
5. To select the contact's Birthday as the journey's Starting Point, click on the Date & Special Events section and then select the highlighted Birthday option:
6. Next, confirm at what point you would like the customer to receive their birthday email. If you would like the email to be sent on the actual day of their Birthday, then enter the number of days as 0 (zero).
Click the Save Starting Point button:
You are then presented with the first view of your Customer journey:
7. Next, click on the Filters tab below your starting point:
8. Filters let you be more specific about who will start a journey.
Select Contacts from a custom segment and you will then be presented with further options:
9. Set the Match the following conditions option to all.
Find and select the Birthday Discount Link option as the filter. You can locate this within the PERSONAL DETAILS ABOUT YOUR CONTACTS section of the options that appear, and then set is not blank as the condition:
10. Next, click Add a journey point on the map"
11. A list of Rules and Actions for the journey point will appear. Select the Send email action:
12. You will then be prompted to configure several options for the email such as the Subject and Schedule time.
Here too is where you will Select a Template for the email. If you have already created your email template as recommended in our previous article How to set-up your Birthday email template in MailChimp then you can find and select that template from the Saved templates section:
13. Selecting your template will open the template builder. Check that you're happy the email template has been set up correctly and that the correct Merge tag values have been used.
Please see the following article with details on how to insert the Birthday Discount Link to your email: MailChimp Customer Journey - adding the Birthday Discount Link to your email
14. Then click Save and Return to Journey:
15. Your Customer Journey map is now ready! To activate your Customer Journey click Continue:
16. And then click Turn On:
Thats it!
Your Birthday Club signups will now receive their Birthday email from MailChimp.
If ypu would prefer to set up your automation using a Classic Automation instead, then please see MailChimp's documentation with details on how to do this : Create a Classic Automation
Need any help?
If you would like any advice or support setting this up, please don't hesitate to get in touch.