The Captured Customer Birthday trigger lets you know when a Customer has joined your Birthday Club and can be used to trigger a number of different Workflow scenarios.
In this article, we'll use the Captured Customer Birthday Flow trigger to send a Slack notification as well as an internal email to your Admin Team, but it's up to you how you implement your trigger.
Quick Links
- Why use the Captured Customer Birthday trigger?
- Requirements
- Selecting the trigger to start the Workflow
- Selecting Send internal email as an action for your Workflow
- Adding a Slack Notification as an action for your Workflow
Why use the Captured Customer Birthday trigger?
The Captured Customer Birthday Flow trigger can be put to use in a number of ways. Here are some examples.
- Let your Admin Team know when a new sign-up to your Birthday Club has occurred
- Acknowledge that a customer has successfully joined your Birthday Club by sending them an email via a Marketing Automation, thanking them and outlining what they can expect from your Birthday Club and when.
- If your loyalty and rewards programme integrates with Shopify Flow, apply reward points to a customer profile when they join your Birthday Club.
Requirements
- You will need the Shopify Flow app installed in your store. Shopify Flow is only available to customers on the Shopify, Advanced, or Shopify Plus plans.
- You will need the Happy Birthday app installed in your store.
- This Flow trigger relies on the Birthday Club member having a customer record within your Shopify Store as the trigger needs to be associated with a valid Shopify Customer ID.
Selecting the trigger to start the Workflow
Launch the Shopify Flow app from within Shopify Admin and click on one of the Create workflow buttons:
The Shopify Flow Editor will then open in fullscreen mode. Click on Select a trigger:
The drawer to the right-hand side of the page will then open and you will be presented with available triggers by Shopify and by any other apps that you have installed.
In this instance, however, we are looking to use the Happy Birthday Discount trigger for our workflow which should appear in the list under INSTALLED APP TRIGGERS:
Happy Birthday trigger not appearing?
If the Happy Birthday Discount app does not appear in the list of installed app triggers, please don't worry, but please do let us know. There is a known Shopify bug that can cause this and we can talk you through how to make the trigger appear.
Click on the Happy Birthday Discount option that appears under INSTALLED APP TRIGGERS and you will see the Captured Customer Birthday trigger:
Click on the Captured Customer Birthday trigger, the screen will refresh and the trigger will be added to your workflow on the left hand side of the screen:
Before we go any further, let's give this workflow a new title.
Click on the title of the workflow which is currently set to New Workflow and give it a descriptive title, something like Birthday added by Customer:
Click anywhere outside of the title input box and the workflow title will be saved.
Now let's add the first of our two actions to this trigger.
Selecting Send internal email as an action for your Workflow
The first action we will add to this workflow is to send an internal email to your Admin Team to inform them that a customer has joined your Birthday Club.
On the trigger that you have just added, click on the + icon to the right of the word Then and click on the Action button:
You will then see a list of Shopify Actions on the right-hand side of the page to select from:
Scroll through the list until you find the Send internal email action and then select it:
The right-hand side of the page will then refresh and you will be presented with the options to configure the action:
Configuring the Send internal email action
Email address
Add in your Admin Team's email address. You need to enter a valid email address or a comma separated list of unique addresses. You can't use variables in this field.
Subject
Enter the subject of the email here. You can use variables in the Subject of the message which can be accessed by clicking on the add a variable link:
Choose your email subject title and select any variables you'd like to include.
As an example, this subject title and variable will inform your admin team that a new birthday has been captured and will include the name of the customer:
Captured Customer Birthday for {{customer.displayName}}
Message
This is the message body of the email that will be sent to your Admin Team.
You can use variables in the message which can be accessed by clicking on the add a variable link:
Scroll through the various trigger variables to find the variables that you'd like to include:
As an example, the message and variables shown below provide further information to your Admin Team about the customer:
{{customer.displayName}} has just joined your Birthday Club.
Their Birthday is on: {{birthday}}
Their email address is: {{customer.email}}
Their email marketing consent status is: {{customer.emailMarketingConsent.marketingState}}
It is entirely up to you and your team what variables and information you'd like to include here.
Please note:
The Send internal email action sends an email from flow@shopify.com. If you have trouble receiving emails from Flow, then verify that your email isn't filtering out emails from this address.
Your workflow should now look something similar to this:
Let's add one more action to this workflow.
Adding a Slack Notification as an action for your workflow
You may decide that you only need a single action for the trigger, but let's add a Slack ping to this one as well.
Once again, on the Captured Customer Birthday trigger in your workflow, click on the + icon to the right of the word Then and click on the Action button:
A new node will appear and the right-hand draw will open again for you to select an action:
Please note
This tutorial does not cover the steps for adding the Slack app to Shopify Flow, however, it is a very simple process and should only take a few minutes to complete.
Click on the Slack option that appears under the INSTALLED APP ACTIONS list and select the only action in that list, which is Send Slack message:
The workflow will then update and you will be presented with the options to configure the action:
Configuring the Send Slack message action
Channel, or member id
Choose whether to send the slack message to a channel or to an individual member of your team. There is no verification on this field, so make sure that whichever of these you choose, that you type in the correct channel name or member id. Channel names should be preceded by a # and member id's preceded by a $.
In our example, we are sending this message to our #backoffice channel:
Message
This is the message body of the slack notification that will be sent to your selected channel or member id.
Once again, you can use variables in the message which can be accessed by clicking on the add a variable link:
Similarly to the email notification, you can scroll through and select the variables that you'd like to include in your slack notification.
We'll use the same message that we used in our email notification for this example, but it is entirely up to you and your team what variables and information you'd like to include here:
That's it! Your workflow should now look something similar to this:
Turning on your workflow
Click on the Turn on workflow button in the top right-hand side of the page.
You'll be asked to confirm that you are ready to turn on the workflow. If you are, then click on the Turn on button:
You workflow is now turned on and you can exit the Flow Editor.
Testing your workflow
Please remember
The Birthday Club Member must also be a customer in your Shopify store, i.e. they have already placed an order or they have created a user account. If they don't have a Shopify Customer account, the Flow trigger will not run.
Create or locate a customer record within your Shopify Admin where you have access to that email account. It's likely to be a test customer that you have used to place test orders on your store.
Make sure that they are not already a member of your Birthday Club by going to the Happy Birthday app, navigating to the Customers view and searching for the email address you have selected.
If they are not already a member of your Birthday Club, no results will be found:
Within the same Customers view in the happy Birthday app, click on the Add new customer button:
Fill in the details of the form using your test customers email address and then hit Save:
Happy Birthday will then send an event to Shopify Flow to initialize the Captured Customer Birthday Trigger and your workflow.
You should receive an email:
and the slack notification:
That's it!
Send/ re-send Flow Trigger
In addition to the advice on testing above, there is also an option to send/ re-send a Flow Trigger for Birthday Club Members with a valid Shopify Customer ID. This option is also useful should a Birthday capture or Birthday event have been missed. Please read our How to send / re-send a Flow Trigger? article for more details.
Need any help?
If you have any trouble setting up your Shopify Flow workflow or have any questions about using our Flow triggers, then please do get in touch.
If you have an idea that requires us to create a new Flow trigger, then once again, please do get in touch.