Birthday Email Marketing
Drive loyalty & sales! Send automated birthday emails & discounts to delight customers. Easy setup.
Mailchimp sends birthday emails, but collecting the data is on you. A setup guide for Shopify stores.
TL;DR: Mailchimp can send birthday emails. But it doesn’t collect birthdays from Shopify. That’s the missing piece most merchants don’t realize until they’re already set up.
Mailchimp is everywhere. Probably the most well-known email platform out there. And yes, it has birthday automation. Sounds perfect for your Shopify store, right? Here’s the thing nobody tells you upfront: when you connect Mailchimp to Shopify, customer data syncs over, but birthdays? Empty field. Mailchimp doesn’t know when anyone’s birthday is. (Looking for something simpler? Check out the Happy Birthday App for Shopify.)
Here’s what happens when you set up Mailchimp with Shopify:
Because Shopify doesn’t collect birthdays. There’s no birthday field at checkout. Customer accounts don’t ask for it. So Mailchimp has nowhere to pull that data from.
Mailchimp’s birthday automation sits there, ready to go, with zero birthdays to trigger on.
Add a birthday field to your Mailchimp popup. When people subscribe, they enter their birthday too.
The catch: this only captures people who fill out your form. Customers who buy without subscribing? No birthday. Your existing customers? You’d have to ask them to subscribe again just to get their birthday.
If you’ve got birthday data somewhere – old CRM, customer surveys, whatever – you can import it.
The catch: one-time fix. Doesn’t help with new customers. And if your dates aren’t formatted consistently (spoiler: they probably aren’t), you’ll spend hours cleaning the data.
This is what most merchants end up doing. Apps like the Happy Birthday App collect birthdays on the thank you page after checkout, then sync to Mailchimp.
Customer buys → enters birthday → data flows to Mailchimp → automation triggers. No manual work.
Once you have birthday data, setup is straightforward:
The hard part isn’t here. The hard part is getting birthdays into the system in the first place.
Mailchimp needs dates in a specific format. European customers write 05/03 meaning March 5th. American systems read it as May 3rd. Import mixed formats and your emails go out on the wrong days.
The Happy Birthday App handles this – you pick DD/MM or MM/DD based on your customer base, and everything syncs to Mailchimp correctly formatted.
Two choices:
Single code for everyone – Create “BIRTHDAY20” in Shopify, paste it in your email. Simple. But people share codes on coupon sites.
Unique codes per customer – More secure, better tracking. But Mailchimp doesn’t generate these. You need an integration that creates unique Shopify discounts and passes them to Mailchimp for each recipient.
Dedicated birthday apps handle unique codes automatically. It’s built in.
Birthday automation needs a paid Mailchimp plan – Essentials or higher. Free plan doesn’t include automation journeys.
If you’re already paying for Mailchimp for newsletters and other flows, adding birthday automation makes sense. If you’d only use Mailchimp for birthdays? A Birthday Club via a dedicated app is way more cost-effective.
If setting up Mailchimp for birthdays sounds like a lot – collecting data, formatting dates, syncing systems, building automations – there’s an easier way.
The Happy Birthday App does everything:
Or if you love Mailchimp’s email editor, use the app for collection and sync to Mailchimp for sending. Get the easy data collection with the builder you prefer.
Mailchimp can send birthday emails. But “can” isn’t the same as “easy.” The real work is collecting birthday data from your Shopify customers – and that’s the part Mailchimp doesn’t do. Thinking about switching to Klaviyo or Omnisend? Same problem there.
For the power of birthday emails without the setup hassle, see the Happy Birthday App for Shopify. Or just try it free.