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

1. From the Flows tab, create a date property-triggered flow.
   
2. 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.
   
3. Choose when you want to start the flow: on or before the person’s birthday.
4. 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.
   
5. Once you configure the settings for the trigger, click Save.
6. 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.
   
7. 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; they will then receive either an SMS (if they have opted-in) or an email on their actual birthday.

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 out half-birthday messages. Simply set the flow to start 6 months before someone’s birthday and then add in your email or SMS.

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

See the date and timestamp formats that Klaviyo accepts.

Read more about date property-triggered flows: 

• Guide to creating a date property-triggered flow
• How date-based flows queue recipients
• About using time delays in date property flows