Please Note:
This article is specifically aimed at Merchants who have already enabled our integration with MailChimp. Please see our MailChimp Integration Basics article before proceeding.
This article will outline the steps required for setting up your Birthday email template within MailChimp.
For further reference, the MailChimp documentation for creating an email template can be found here: create-a-template-with-the-template-builder
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.
Locating the Birthday Discount Link merge tag within MailChimp.
Each field within a MailChimp audience has a corresponding and unique merge tag. You're likely already familiar with these, but if not, they look like a snippet of text wrapped in special characters. Such as *|EXAMPLE|*.
When a merge tag is inserted within an email, the tag is replaced with the content stored in the corresponding audience field. As an audience field itself, the Birthday Discount Link also has a corresponding merge tag. Your audience merge tags can be found by clicking on the audience Settings dropdown menu and selecting Audience fields and *|MERGE|* tags:
You will notice in the screenshot below that there are two options of merge tags for most fields. We recommend using the *|BDAYLINK|* option. (Tip: You may want to copy this merge tag from here to your clipboard. Or at least keep this article open and come back to it as you follow the steps below.)
Creating your Email template
Steps:
1. To begin creating your email template, navigate to Campaigns > Email templates:
2. Click on the Create Template button:
3. Choose your starting email template.
We will want our email to contain a call to action (CTA) such as a Button as this is where we'll be pasting in the merge tag for our Birthday Discount Link. So for this example we will choose a basic template already containing a button block. Although elements such as buttons can be added at any point:
4. We have kept the email layout very simple. Click into the Button content block to edit:
5. The merge tag for the Birthday Discount Link field, *|BDAYLINK|* has been entered into the Web address (URL) button section. When the customer receives their email and clicks on that button, they will be directed automatically to their Generate Discount Page:
6. Once you're happy that you have completed all the required fields, click the Save & Close button bottom right of the page to save your email content:
7. Click on the Save and Exit button that appears:
8. Finally, you will then be prompted to name and Save your email Template:
And that's it! You have now added the Birthday Discount Link to your Email template.
Next Steps
Set-up your Birthday email campaign within MailChimp using the email template you have created here. More details in this article: set-up your Birthday email campaign in MailChimp - (Customer Journey method)
Need any help?
If you would like any advice or support setting this up, please don't hesitate to get in touch.