How to build a birthday flow
You will learn
Learn how to create a flow that sends out messages on a customer's birthday in order to show how much you care about your customers. After all, who doesn’t like being wished a happy birthday?
A birthday flow can be made a number of different ways:
- Containing only 1 message
- Include many splits for enhanced personalization
- Be both a half-birthday and birthday flow
In this article, you’ll learn how to create a birthday flow and see examples of what this flow can look like.
Before you begin
Before you can use a birthday flow, you must collect birthdays as a profile property on your customers' profiles. There are several ways to do this.
- Add a date field to a sign-up form for subscribers to fill out their birthday.
- Manually import birthdays using a CSV file.
- Ecommerce integrations will import birthdays as a profile property if it exists as a property within the ecommerce platform.
Create a birthday flow
- From the Flows tab, create a date property-triggered flow.
- In the dropdown, choose the property you used to collect subscribers’ birthdays. You need at least 1 profile to have this property in order for it to appear in the dropdown. If you don’t see any listed, check that profiles’ birthdays are in 1 of the accepted date formats.
- Choose when you want to start the flow: on or before the person’s birthday.
- Then, choose the time of day for the target date delay. For birthday flows, we recommend setting this to earlier in the day and using Recipient’s Local Timezone. Here, we set the delay to 9 am. For how often you want the flow to repeat, choose Yearly.
- Once you configure the settings for the trigger, click Save.
- If you choose for the flow to begin before the date, a target date delay will appear. This point represents the day of someone’s birthday and you can add actions before or after this point.
- Next, begin adding your messages. Make sure to add a message on the profile’s actual birthday. Below is a single-message example.
Birthday flow examples
Starting slightly before a birthday
Setting the flow to start before a birthday is useful when you’re providing an in-person offer or discount, as it gives them time to plan when they want to use it. You can then follow up on the day-of to wish them a happy birthday and remind them of your offer.
In the following example, a flow email is sent a week before the recipient’s birthday. On their actual birthday, they will then receive either an SMS or WhatsApp message (if they have opted in to one of those channels) or an email.
Sending a half-birthday message
Many people expect to get birthday wishes from businesses on or around their birthday, but it’s not the same for their half-birthday. Wishing your subscribers a happy half-birthday is a nice gesture and a way to remind them about your brand.
Using the same setup as above, you can also send half-birthday messages. Set the flow to start 6 months before someone’s birthday and then add your email, SMS, or WhatsApp message.
RAREFORM uses a similar concept in their half-birthday flow. Their flow contains only 1 message, shown below, which contains a lighthearted message and discount for recipients.
Personalize your birthday flow
As you grow and gain more information about your subscribers, consider adding more personalization into your birthday and half-birthday flows. For instance, you can use conditional splits based on profile properties to show products/styles you know they love.
Additional resources
- Acceptable date and timestamp formats for profile and event properties reference
Learn which date and time formats Klaviyo recognizes in event and profile data sent through our APIs or in a CSV upload. Note that this does not apply to an event timestamp sent via the Track API, which must be unix time in seconds.
Read more about date property-triggered flows:
- How to create a date property-triggered flow
Learn how to set up a date property to trigger a flow, which is a great way to set up a flow sequence around key dates you collect from subscribers. Common examples of date property-triggered flows include:
- Understanding how date-based flows schedule recipients
Learn how profiles enter date-based flows and what happens when a date is added or changed. For instance, what happens if someone is about to enter the flow, but the date is suddenly changed or deleted altogether? This article runs through what happens for date property-triggered flows when dates are added, updated, or deleted from a profile.
- Understanding time delays in date property flows
When you configure a flow to start before a specific date, a target date delay component is automatically created to serve as an anchor point within the flow. This component will have a target icon and will say Wait until person's [Date Property]. When using time delays in this type of flow, they appear different depending on whether they are used before or after the anchor point. This article goes over using time delays in date-based flows.