The problem

A recent client rewards its regular customers with VIP status. Two orders within 365 days earns it, and VIPs get their own email programme. The brand also wanted customers warned before their status lapsed, and removed from the programme once it had.

Their email platform, Dotdigital, holds the lists and sends the emails, but the order history that decides who qualifies lives in Shopify. Keeping the VIP list accurate meant exporting customers, counting orders against dates and updating lists by hand, and customers who had already earned VIP status in the past year had to be carried over too.

What we did

We built three Shopify Flow automations, each linked to its own Dotdigital programme. The first finds customers who have placed two orders within 365 days, adds them to the VIP list and starts them on the VIP email programme. The second finds VIPs whose status is about to lapse and passes them to a programme that tells them before it happens. The third removes customers from the VIP list once their status has gone.

To carry over existing VIPs, we found everyone who had earned the status in the previous year and sent them a one-off VIP campaign. Once the ongoing programme was adding new VIPs on its own, that campaign was ended.

Results

VIP status now looks after itself. A customer's second order in a year makes them a VIP straight away, the VIP emails start without anyone opening a spreadsheet, and the programme tells them before their status runs out, at the point where one more order would keep it.

That last step is where the commercial value sits. A VIP about to lapse is one of the easiest customers to bring back, but only if you reach them in time, and a list updated by hand rarely does.

We put the rule in Shopify rather than the email platform because that is where the order history is. Dotdigital is good at deciding what a VIP receives; Shopify is the system that knows, at the moment of purchase, who has earned it. Splitting the work that way keeps the list accurate and leaves each tool doing what it does well.

If the client wants to change what earns VIP status, it is one Flow to edit, and the team can see every run in the Shopify admin.

Running a loyalty tier your team updates by hand? Tell us about your project.