This article recaps the "Welcome events" segment of our Lifecycle Marketing That Drives Repeat Orders webinar (AppFront Growth Series, Campaigns 101). With triggers covered, this is the first group of events: registration, birthday, and anniversary.

A registration event fires the moment someone signs up for your loyalty program — often used to deliver a welcome reward before the customer has spent anything. There's a real debate worth having on your team: reward sign-up itself, or wait for a first purchase so the customer has "skin in the game"? Rewarding sign-up tends to win on acquisition, since it gives people a clear reason to join, and a registration reward can be set to expire to help close the gap to that first visit.

Registration also pairs well with deep linking: you can run separate registration campaigns on different channels (Instagram, Facebook, in-store) almost like an A/B test, since each audience may respond differently to the same offer.

Birthday campaigns can fire on the exact day (e.g., a free item delivered at 9am) or, alternatively, run for the customer's entire birthday month — useful since many customers already get flooded with birthday-week offers from other brands and may want more time to plan a visit. You can also vary the birthday reward by tier, so members in a higher tier get a better birthday offer.

Anniversary campaigns celebrate the date a customer joined your program, one year (or more) later. The recommendation: change the offer every year rather than repeating the same reward, so the anniversary keeps feeling like a genuine thank-you rather than an automated repeat.

Next up: the "frequency" engines — visit-based, time-based, and stored value campaigns that turn a first visit into a habit.