Charles Herren

How Veerah Uses Birthday Marketing to Grow Subscriber Lists, Drive Revenue & Increase LTV

Marketing to customers on their birthday is a fantastic way to drive revenue and boost LTV. It’s personalized, it’s friendly, and it creates some great affinity for your brand.

But, organizing the campaigns can be a nightmare. 

The sticking point tends to come between two points:

  1. Collecting birthday information from customers and subscribers
  2. Promoting special offers to individual people when their birthday comes around

Luckily, there’s a brand that nails it with birthday marketing: Veerah.

The company was founded by Stacey Chang back in 2016 with a vision to build a brand that promoted sustainable, eco-friendly footwear. Based in New York, Veerah sells ethically-designed shoes to eco-conscious women while contributing 1% of its annual revenue to social causes.

In this post, we break down Veerah’s birthday marketing strategy so you can learn how to implement your own. We look at:

  • How Veerah’s team runs high-ROI birthday marketing campaigns using time-delayed popups to collect contact information and other key data
  • How this brand leverages ConvertFlow’s broadcasts feature to deploy birthday marketing campaigns to customers across the brand’s ecommerce website
  • Actionable birthday marketing strategies you can use to drive more revenue and build LTV in an ecommerce business

What is birthday marketing?

Birthday marketing is precisely what the name implies. Brands use birthday marketing campaigns to nurture stronger relationships with their customers by giving them a special discount or something of value for free to celebrate their birthday.

Most savvy marketers know that people buy on emotion and justify their actions logically. The fact that it’s their birthday can be the “logical” excuse they need to justify indulging themselves and buying something special.

How Veerah launches high-ROI birthday marketing campaigns

Veerah’s team excels at using ConvertFlow’s “Visitor Segments” and “Broadcast Campaigns” features to deploy various birthday marketing campaigns to customers.

Here’s a quick overview of this fast-growing brand’s three-step strategy:

  1. When new visitors come to Veerah’s website/Shopify store, they see a two-step welcome popup to capture their name, email, and birthday month
  2. After completing step one of the popup, step two asks for subscribers’ mobile phone numbers so they can receive SMS notifications
  3. With data collected by the popup, Veerah segments new contacts in its CRM by birthday month. This lets them show on-site campaigns throughout the month that coincides with each person’s birthday.

Now, let’s dig deeper into how Veerah has set up its birthday marketing campaigns inside ConvertFlow to drive more ecommerce revenue.

Part One: Collecting birthday data from first-time visitors

The first part of Veerah’s birthday marketing strategy is all about collecting data from first-time visitors. The goal here is to grow their subscriber list, then encourage new subscribers to make a purchase in that first session.

Here’s how Veerah sets this up in ConvertFlow: 

1. Set up dynamic visitor segments

To launch its birthday marketing campaigns, Veerah’s team carefully created an array of pre-defined, ready-to-use visitor segments.

Segmentation allows brands to divide their audiences into groups to target them more effectively. 

Veerah can give each returning customer a more personalized, VIP shopping experience by segmenting the traffic returning to its online store. 

Here are a few examples of how Veerah uses pre-defined visitor segments:

  • Birthday month
  • Customers only
  • First-time visitors only
  • Repeat visitor and customer
  • Sweepstakes signup
Veerah visitor segments

Each of these visitor segments contains different targeting conditions:

Visitor segment targeting conditions

Each of these segment groups will then be available to use when it comes to targeting conditions for the various upcoming campaigns.

2. The two-step welcome offer popup

Veerah’s first call-to-action is a time-delay popup that appears after a visitor browses the company’s website and online store for 17 seconds.

This triggered two-step welcome popup is designed to capture the visitor’s first name, email address, and birthday on the first step. It offers people a 10% discount on their first order in exchange for their contact information:

Birthday marketing popup step one

In the screenshot above, you’ll notice that the popup’s copy delivers a pair of compelling reasons for shoppers to enter their contact and birthday information. 

After the headline, “Enjoy 10% Off Your First Order,” the subhead says, “Get early access to new styles and a surprise gift on your birthday!”

The goal of the second step of the popup is to capture the subscribers’ mobile phone numbers so that they can receive “SMS notifications for more exclusive offers!”

Birthday marketing popup step two

The final step of the welcome popup delivers the shopper’s discount code along with a button CTA, giving them a chance to “Shop Vegan.”

Birthday marketing popup step three

3. Welcome offer reminder popup

In a perfect world, everybody who lands on a brand’s website eagerly signs up for its list the first time they see a popup with a special offer. 

Unfortunately, 100% conversion rates are almost non-existent, and that’s why Veerah smartly launches a time-delay welcome offer reminder popup after visitors have been navigating the company’s site for 60 second:

Birthday marketing reminder popup

While the copy and offer on the welcome offer reminder popup are the same as the first popup, it only shows if the shopper didn’t initially sign up or convert.

4. Last-ditch sweepstakes offer (for list growth)

Ecommerce and DTC marketers know that building their lists and selling more to current and past customers are key drivers of revenue growth, LTV, and profitability. 

Successful brands prioritize collecting peoples’ contact information and growing their lists, especially with today’s skyrocketing customer acquisition costs.

Here, in a last-ditch effort to get a visitor’s information, Veerah launches a popup offering the visitor a chance to enter a sweepstake where they can win $50:

Birthday sweepstakes offer

The “last-ditch” popup shown above triggers upon exit intent only if the visitor didn’t convert after the first two popup attempts. So, it really is a final push to secure someone as at least an email subscriber if they're not quite ready to buy now.

Here, you can see how Veerah’s team created different segments and conditions that apply if someone has NOT converted with any of the other popup attempts:

Sweepstakes targeting conditions

The chance to win a $50 sweepstakes teases a higher value return for visitors than 10% off their first order. Of course, this assumes that their first order will be less than $500.

5. Reminding people to use their discount code

The next call-to-action in Veerah’s funnel is a popup that reminds shoppers to use their code to save 10% on their first order:

Discount code reminder popup

This happens automatically when ConvertFlow recognizes a returning customer and shows them the popup to move them through the conversion process.

You can see in the conditions shown in the image that the popup is set to appear on exit-intent if the person DID convert on one of the other welcome offer popups:

Returning visitor conditions

Part Two: Promoting birthday codes to returning visitors

We’ve seen how Veerah’s team uses pre-defined customer segments and time-delayed, triggered popups to compel people to place their first order.

Now, let’s see how they deploy birthday marketing campaigns designed to re-engage customers and grow LTV consistently.

The “treat yourself” popup

Below, you’ll see a “Happy Birthday” popup crafted in ConvertFlow with a code that gives customers $50 off during their birthday month:

Birthday marketing promo overlay popup

This example popup is set with a 17-second time delay, so it triggers after the person has already started navigating Veerah’s ecommerce site.

Pay close attention to how the copy creates urgency: “This month only, celebrate with $50 off using code XXXX.” Then, the button copy gives shoppers another compelling reason to place an order with the words, “TREAT YOURSELF.”

Targeting the birthday popup using broadcast campaigns

Inside ConvertFlow, “Broadcasts” are high-priority campaigns that display all the time or within a given timeframe. 

Broadcasts help marketers streamline their conversion workflows by launching multiple campaigns together that achieve the same goal. Broadcasts also let you schedule campaigns that take priority on your website.

In Veerah’s case, they’ve created Broadcast Campaigns for each month of the year. This lets them show targeted, customer-specific popups during people’s birthday month. 

ConvertFlow’s broadcast interface lets teams track important metrics, including:

  • Campaigns (number of)
  • Views
  • Conversions
  • Completions

Here, you’ll see how Veerah has created broadcast campaigns for all 12 months:

Birthday marketing broadcasts

In addition to creating broadcasts for every month of the year, Veerah schedules its campaigns to launch at the beginning of the customer’s birthday month and end on the first day of the following month:

January birthdays broadcast schedule

Below, you can see how Veerah defines how ConvertFlow will launch its birthday broadcast campaigns, including which campaigns are displayed when customers meet specific, pre-determined conditions:

Full birthday marketing campaign January setup example

Non-birthday month popups

This post primarily focuses on how Veerah successfully deploys birthday marketing campaigns using ConvertFlow’s visitor segments and broadcast capabilities. But, the company also uses non-birthday popups to engage customers and drive more sales revenue throughout the year.

In the image below, you can see an example of one of Veerah’s product recommendation popups:

Product recommendation popup example

It appears to returning visitors and customers who don’t have a birthday during that particular month after they’ve been on a page for 17 seconds.

Grow your brand with birthday marketing today 

Veerah is an outstanding example of how ecommerce and DTC marketers can successfully leverage birthday marketing to drive more sales and grow LTV. 

Marketing to people during their birthday month is a powerful strategy. Their price sensitivity is usually lower around their birthday, and they’re more likely to indulge themselves by buying something special they wouldn’t have bought at another time of the year.   

With customer acquisition costs at all-time highs, smart marketers always look for cost-effective ways to engage new and past customers to get them to back their online stores and sell them more products. 

After all, the more you sell to each customer, the higher your ROAS and the more revenue you have to reinvest in marketing that grows your brand consistently.  

Hopefully, you’ll apply some or all of the birthday marketing strategies you learned in this case study to your business. 

Want to get started? Head over to ConvertFlow's template library for access to professionally-designed templates and other resources you need to get started today!

About the author
Charles Herren
Case Studies Contributor, ConvertFlow
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Charles is a conversion copywriter specializing in case studies and story-driven content. He contributes conversion stories to ConvertFlow and has written for a variety of marketing websites and publications.