Gift subscriptions 🎁

Native gift option for our prepaid subscription feature.

Overview

Gifts for prepaid subscriptions allow customers to purchase a subscription for another person. This unlocks new opportunities to increase sales and engagement—just in time for BFCM ( Black Friday/Cyber Monday)! The gift purchaser pays for the entire subscription upfront and we handle the rest!

Awtomic sends communications to the gift recipient automatically. After purchase, they receive a gift note via email, and then we continue to send order reminders to the recipient—even allowing them to manage their own gift! This means that recipients can skip, reschedule, and even swap variants if they want to switch things up along the way.

Gifts used to be a pain because the login info was always tied to the purchaser. No more with Awtomic Subcriptions.

How to Set up Gift Subscriptions

To enable the setting, you must have a Multi-order Prepaid Subscription plan ready. To learn more about this feature, please read this article prior to continuing: Single-order vs Multi-order prepaid plans

Note: If you need assistance setting up a Multi-order Prepaid Subscription, don't hesitate to reach out via [email protected]

Once you have the required prepaid plan and product set up, scroll down to the Prepaid terms section and select "Enable gifting on this prepaid plan". This option is only available on non-auto-renew plans, so be sure that "Does not autorenew" is selected from the Autorenew Dropdown.

Now navigate to the Shopify PDP (product detail page) of your prepaid subscription. You should see a "This is a gift" checkbox below the plan selector. This reveals a gift form that the purchaser uses to provide the recipient's name, a delivery email address, as well as an optional gift note.

Important note: If the gift checkbox doesn't appear automatically, we may need to install it into your theme directly. Reach out to support@awtomic for assistance and someone on our team will reach out to coordinate the setup.


How does it work?

When the purchaser selects the gift and completes checkout with the gift recipient as the delivery address, an order gets placed in Shopify and a corresponding subscription gets created in our system. This first order is meant to collect the entirety of the subscription. This is why it's important to create a separate product that is properly priced for the gift term (read more about this in Step 3. Creating a product of the Multi-order prepaid article)

The underlying subscription can be found by searching your subscription list or by navigating from the "View subscription" link in the order. What makes these subscriptions unique is that our system displays that it's a gift along with the fact that there are two customers outlined in the subscription: The purchaser and the Recipient. Additionally, the subscription is marked with the Gift badge.

The purchaser is still technically the "customer" of the subscription, although the "recipient" is the one who receives the gift as well as all of the emails from our system. This allows them to make changes such as updating their delivery address, skipping or rescheduling the next billing date, and even updating their selection.

When the gift recipient logs into their account, all pricing information is hidden by default. We also obscure the payment method on file.

Once the recipient receives all of their deliveries, we make the subscription Expired.


Klaviyo events

We've made a number of enhancements to our existing Klaviyo integration to better support this new gift functionality.

  1. The isGift property

    isGift:true
    

    Whenever a subscription is marked as a gift, the new "isGift" property is set to true. This allows you to create flows or content specifically for gift subscriptions.

  2. The giftInfo property

    giftInfo:{"firstName": "Adrian", "lastName": "Andrade", "email": "[email protected]","giftNote":"Happy birthday!"}
    

    When a gift is purchased, we send the name, email, and gift note information to all of the existing Klaviyo events of the associated subscription. This allows you to present this information however you like to customers.

  3. Sequence information

    "sequence":"1 of 6"
    

    We've modified the current prepaid event to include the sequence. This data can be found in the variants property.

    This allows you to know what position of the prepaid (and gift), this event represents. For instance, you may want to send unique content or add a badge that represents the sequence.

  4. Two new Klaviyo events that correspond to Gift Recipients + Purchaser info

    Gift Recipient Subscription Created
    

    This event is identical to the current "Subscription Created" event except for the fact that the email/customer associated with it is the Gift Recipient, not the purchaser. This allows you to create a unique flow for recipients.

    Gift Recipient Subscription Upcoming Order
    

    This event is identical to the current "Subscription Upcoming Order" event except for the fact that the email/customer associated with it is the Gift Recipient, not the purchaser. This allows you to create a unique flow for recipients.

    purchaserInfo: {"firstName":"Adrian", "lastName":"Andrade", "email":"[email protected]"}
    

    Both of these events also get the purchaser information added to them. This allows you to tell the gift recipient who is gifting them the subscription.

Important: You may want to disable existing templates when isGift is true for the purchaser. This will limit confusion if you do not intend to send gift purchaser emails. We do not turn these events off to allow merchants to create unique experiences if needed.


Awtomic emails

Besides Klaviyo, you have the option of using our system to send gift recipient emails. We've added two new emails that are aimed at gift recipients: the gift note email (welcome) and a modified version of the "upcoming order email", which hides all pricing information.

  1. The gift note email

    This is a new email that gets triggered when the purchaser buys the subscription. It is sent directly to the recipient along with the gift note if one is available.

  2. Upcoming order email (modified)
    This email is similar to our existing 'upcoming order email' but has some modifications: mainly that the prices of the subscription are suppressed.
    This email also contains a "manage subscription" link that allows gift recipients to make changes to their gift subscriptions. This link automatically logs them in without the need of a password so they can skip, reschedule, or swap variants.

We use the existing design options from your Awtomic email settings, so there's no need to do anything to enable these emails.

If you don't want to use Awtomic's gift emails, you have the option of turning those off. Simply navigate to email settings via the Setting menu button at the top right, then selecting on "Customize" in the "Email Customization" section. From there, scroll down near the bottom of the page and locate the corresponding checkboxes you would like to turn off.


Customer and customer tags

As mentioned in the "How does it work" section above, each gift subscription represents two customers: the purchaser and the recipient. This means that each subscription must reference two unique customers within your Shopify store.

To do this, we automatically create the necessary customers during the purchase process. From the subscription detail page in the Admin app, you can find the customer information on the right column near the bottom.

The purchaser receives all the typical tags, such as Subscription Customer and Subscription Active. The gift recipient receives the Gift tag. You can use these tags to create unique segments in Shopify and Klaviyo.


Reach out to Awtomic support via [email protected] if you need help setting up Gift subscriptions on your store!