Customer journey masterclass

VIP doesn't have to mean a customer in a VIP tier, although we strongly recommend running one because it lets you reward customers differently. It means the customer is important to you because they purchase frequently: typically from the third, fourth, fifth or sixth order onwards.

Put an illustrative value on each stage and the gap becomes obvious. A first purchase might be worth around $100. By the time a customer is a repeat buyer they might be at $300, because their basket has grown along with their trust in you. A VIP sits anywhere from $500 up to $3,000 or more, depending on how you treat them and how your tiers scale on lifetime value.

At every one of those points, first purchase, repeat, VIP, each tier, the customer needs different messaging and potentially an entirely different shopping experience. As customer value increases, the job of communicating with that customer keeps adjusting. That is the whole idea behind this playbook.

The guest: engage

A guest has spent $0. The job is to get them to engage: sign up, exchange some information, give you an email address and maybe a phone number for SMS, and start to trust the brand.

The member: convert

A member has also spent $0, but you now have their details, which makes the job easier. Market the products, show reviews, get them familiar with the range, and convert them into a paying customer.

First purchase and repeat: frequency

Once a customer has bought once, twice or three times, the job is frequency. Nurture them into buying more often so they move into VIP status: remarket similar products, suggest pairings, upsell into other lines in your portfolio.

The VIP: recognition

For a VIP in tier 2 or 3, with $500 to $1,000 or more in lifetime value, the goal is no longer frequency or conversion. Those still matter, but the most important goal is to make the customer feel recognised. They have been converted. They trust you. They know the products and they know they are loyal. What they want now is to feel part of the community.

This is where the snowball starts. VIPs who feel recognised champion the brand, refer their friends and use your products where other people see them. None of that comes from bribing them with another discount or another sale.

All of it is powered by customer data. Think of it as a tree: the customer sits at the top, their data flows into email and SMS (Klaviyo, Attentive), the website (Shopify) and the customer account (tied to loyalty), and each of those shapes the customer experience.

Optimise every touchpoint on:

• Who they are
• What they have bought: which collections, which products, where they shop in your portfolio
• Their loyalty status and VIP tier
• Whether they are about to progress to the next tier or about to be downgraded
• Whether they are active or starting to lapse

These are data-driven decisions rather than blind ones. The same data tells you who is close to a tier and who is drifting away, so the messaging can change before they lapse.

Give them a reason to identify themselves

The objective at this stage is simple: give the guest a reason to identify and engage with the brand. Encourage it with a sign-up incentive: a first-order discount, member pricing, slightly earlier access to a drop. Whatever fits your brand, there must be a clear value exchange.

Customers are more protective of their data

Over the past year or two, customers have become noticeably more careful about handing over their details. Since “continue with Shop” made signing up a one-click action, people end up on a lot of email lists, sometimes without realising it. So they are cautious about engaging until they trust the brand.

The exchange has to be explicit: give us a little information and consent to market to you, and we will give you something in return. That might be X points, $5 store credit on sign-up, or early access. It has to make sense for your margins and what you sell, but there is almost always an angle.

Once a guest enrols, communication changes entirely. They are no longer an anonymous visitor. They are a known customer with an account, and that account is where the rest of the journey lives. See how Mage customer accounts work on Shopify.

A new member needs to understand everything about how you incentivise purchases: how the program works, how they earn, how they redeem, what they get access to, and what the journey looks like from here. The more they spend, the more they grow, and the more they get back and are recognised. Drill into why they should make that first purchase: show them you value customers, that they get rewarded immediately, and that they are joining a community.

The mistake

Many brands put up a loyalty page, install whatever provider they picked, add earning rules and rewards that sound good without thinking about AOV, gross profit margin or CAC, and hope the customer finds it. Or they send a single welcome email with “by the way, we have a loyalty program” at the bottom. Neither works. Customers are in a lot of programs already. Yours has to be clearer, more worthwhile and better thought out, and it has to balance rewarding enough to drive the first purchase against your gross margin on AOV and your CAC, so you don't inject too much value.

How to activate a new member

Start by remarketing products that fit what they bought, based on the first purchase. You already have the data on what other customers bought after that same first order, so market the pairings. In apparel, a black t-shirt leads to jeans and a white t-shirt. In cosmetics, shampoo leads to conditioner. Every brand can find its own version of this.

This is the frequency job from chapter 2. The customer trusts you enough to have bought once. Now show them the next thing to buy, and give them a reason to buy it sooner rather than later. That reason is usually the next tier.

Tier 2: slightly above AOV

Set the tier 2 entry point slightly above your AOV. One of two things happens. Either the initial basket size goes up as customers try to hit tier 2 on the first purchase, which raises AOV, or you have a valid reason to remarket: “you are $X away from tier 2”. Both outcomes are good.

Tier 3 and beyond

Continue the pattern through tiers 3, 4 and 5. Tier 3 sits at around twice your AOV, tier 4 slightly higher again, and so on. Once a customer is in tier 2 or 3 you have long since covered CAC, so the rewards can become more attractive, provided you keep watching gross margin on AOV.

Scale value up to keep customers championing the brand, and introduce things that don't cost money: even earlier access, specific VIP products, and small touches such as key rings, tote bags or a VIP card. Show customers that as they spend and return, they progress. Our VIP tiers for Shopify page covers how thresholds, rolling windows and rewards fit together.

The retention masterclass goes deeper on status as a lever and why a rolling 12-month window works better than lifetime status. See bring customers back sooner.

Brand A takes 120 days to get a customer from first to second purchase. Brand B takes 30. Both acquired a repeat customer, but Brand B recovers its acquisition cost four times faster and reinvests it. While Brand A is still waiting for the second order, Brand B has secured the third, fourth and fifth and acquired more customers with the cash. It is a compounding snowball, and the sooner the second purchase, the sooner repeat behaviour starts.

How to speed it up

• Product education: how the line works and why it is good.
• Reviews, testimonials and UGC. At Mage we reward media reviews far more than text reviews, because customers who see how others use the products want to add their own.
• Replenishment, cross-sells and similar products.
• Progression to the next tier, using the thresholds above.

Once customers purchase fast enough and often enough, participation in tiers 2, 3 and 4 climbs and lifetime value rises with it. We cover the metric in full, including why to use the median and the worked example, in the retention masterclass under time to second purchase, and in the time to second purchase guide.

First, tell them they have hit the tier with a VIP tier upgrade email. Then show them what it means. You are educating the customer, not about the brand, but about their status, while making them feel valued.

What to offer at tier 2

• Bonus point events that are exclusive to VIP members and require a purchase.
• Automatic free shipping. One of the top performers. Depending on your shipping margin you might reserve it for higher tiers, but if it works at tier 2, do it.
• Early access, the early days of it: a few hours, half an hour, even 20 minutes of early entry to a sale or drop. It costs nothing.
• Scaled cashback. Points are cashback in disguise, X% back per purchase. Tier 1 might earn 5%, tier 2 7%, and so on as CAC is covered. Don't inject too much value yet.

It is too soon for exclusive VIP products. The cost of low-volume production is too high at this stage. Focus on things that encourage purchases: the free shipping upgrade, bonus point events that need an order, and early access. Then communicate the benefits and the exclusivity clearly.

Don't let it become a discount ladder

If the message at every tier is “spend more, get another discount, get more cashback”, you have built a scaled discount system, not a loyalty program. Provide real value instead:

• Earlier early access at each tier: gold gets 24 hours, the top tier gets two days, for both sales and drops.
• Exclusive VIP events, sized to lifetime value and profit per order, and different events per tier: run clubs, brunches, parties, dinners.

All of this ties back to profitability and AOV per tier, but the point is to build an experience that is not simply a bigger discount. The retention masterclass covers the same principle from the margin side in discounts vs incentives.

Deepen the relationship through support

Beyond events and early access, tie the tiers into customer support. Give the highest tiers a dedicated support line with a real person on the phone who can recommend products. Or, in Gorgias, set up a priority support queue and surface the customer's tier so the support team knows they are talking to a high-value customer and treats them accordingly.

American Express does this well: “thank you for being a valued member of five years”. If a Shopify store executes this, it is in the top 1%, because almost nobody does it. Mage feeds tier data into support providers so the team can see it.

Transactional messaging is “buy XYZ product”, “buy this collection”, “here's 10% off your next order”. Relational messaging is “here's your exclusive reward that you've earned, this is just for you”, “here's early access”, “we thought you'd want to see this first”.

The last row is the one to study. “You get early access because you're a silver member, click here” is a corporate email drummed up to force a transaction. “Hey John, thanks for being a valued member who has spent X with us and shopped with us for over two years, we thought you'd want to see this first” uses relational data to build the message. Same offer. Completely different feeling.

Most people think “build a loyalty program, improve AOV and RPR, make more money”. Move from transactional thinking to relational thinking and the money follows, because you are building a different feeling through the entire buying process.

At this point you are not trying to incentivise further purchases. These customers don't need their loyalty bought. They will purchase again anyway. The job is to nurture the relationship and keep the cycle going.

The most popular way to do that right now is tiered early access: tier 1 gets 30 minutes, tier 2 gets 2 hours, tier 3 gets 24 hours. It costs nothing, it makes the top tier feel like the top tier, and it works especially well around Black Friday.

The retention masterclass makes the same argument from the other side, in protect the relationship with your best customers: the question is not how to extract more from a VIP, it is how to retain them.

The mechanism is the customer object in Shopify Liquid, which exposes the customer's data to the storefront. When you run a sale, the logic is simple:

1. 1.Is the customer logged in? If not, they get the guest experience.
2. 2.If they are, they get the member experience. Check the customer tag.
3. 3.Tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 are auto-tagged (Mage does this), and each tag links to a different experience and a different early access window.

Surface that data to the storefront, to your ESP, to Klaviyo, everywhere in the stack. That is how you separate your highest-value customers from the ones who are just starting. This is a basic implementation, and you can build many more experiences on the storefront and in email from the same tags.

Shopify segments can be built from customer tags too, and used for marketing, points drops, bonus campaigns and store credit drops. Tagging and segmenting are automatic in Mage. If you are not auto-tagging and segmenting, you should be, because data-driven decisions make more money. The customer account is where much of this shows up for the customer: their tier, their progress and the rewards waiting for them.

• Guest: enrol them, activate the account, capture data.
• Tier 1 (first purchase made): progress them through the tiers and drive purchase frequency. The aim is to move a tier 1 customer to tier 3.
• Tier 2 (repeat purchaser, loyalty established): retain. Nurture the relationship, give exclusive access, and stop tempting them with discounts.
• Tier 3: recognise. Exclusivity, exclusive access, events, automatic shipping upgrades at the cart. Who doesn't like faster delivery?

Tie it in everywhere: the storefront is different, the emails are different, the account experience is different, the recommendations are different. Once the experience is personalised, you extract higher customer value because customers feel the journey changing. The storefront changes. They get earlier access than their friends and the public. Their account looks different. The emails identify and nurture them. Customers know which brands have this and which don't.

The lifetime value numbers throughout this playbook are illustrative. Your thresholds depend on your brand and usually tie back to AOV. What matters is knowing where each customer sits for your brand.

The journey is a relationship, not a series of transactions

Guests need a reason to join. A new customer who has made a first purchase needs a reason to come back. VIPs need to feel recognised and valued, and to feel they are getting something for staying loyal instead of going to a competitor. As customer value increases, communication should evolve, and the whole experience should elevate as the customer elevates with the brand.

Mage powers this on Shopify: customer accounts, VIP tiers, points and store credit, with strategy support by niche.