SFCC Beyond the Basics: Campaign Setup Advanced Strategies

In the intro to this series, we established that SFCC Campaigns are far more powerful than most implementations use them for. Today, we go hands-on with Business Manager configurations and walk through the birthday banner example in full.

Campaign Anatomy: The Two Core Sections

Every Campaign in SFCC is built from two sections:

Scheduling & Qualifiers

This section defines who sees the campaign and when:

Start and End Dates — the campaign’s active window (can be set to no start/end date for ongoing campaigns)
Customer Groups — segments such as loyalty members, new customers, or custom dynamic groups
Source Codes — tracking codes attached to links (useful for email campaigns)
Coupons — voucher codes that qualify a customer for the campaign

Experiences

This section defines what qualifying customers see:

Slot Configurations — content displayed in content slots on the storefront
Promotions — discounts and offers triggered by the campaign
Sorting Rules — how products are ordered on category pages for this audience
Keyword Search Sorting Rules — how search results are ordered

Let’s configure the birthday banner from end to end.

Step 1: Scheduling & Qualifiers

Customer Group Configuration:

Create a dynamic customer group with the following membership rule:

Under Include customers with, select the customer.profile.birthday attribute
Set the operator to is today

This group will automatically include any logged-in customer whose birthday is the current date.

Step 2: Experiences

Slot Configuration:

Create a content slot on the homepage for the birthday banner. In the slot content, you can personalise the message using session.customer to reference the customer’s name dynamically — this works because the birthday customer group qualifier ensures only logged-in customers will ever see this slot.

Promotion:

Set up a birthday discount promotion. Choose the promotion type that fits your business: percentage off, fixed amount, or a free gift. Assign this promotion to the campaign.

Step 3: Campaign Assembly

Add all of the above configurations to the campaign, and set:

Start date: No start date
End date: No end date

An ongoing campaign with a dynamic customer group that resolves to “today’s birthday” is effectively a perpetual birthday programme — no manual maintenance required.

Additional Advanced Strategies

The same pattern applies to a range of use cases:

Refill reminder banners — nudge customers to restock based on past purchase patterns, using a customer group built from order history
Targeted category banners — advertise specific offers on product listing pages tailored to customer spending behaviour
Personalised sorting — sort PLPs based on individual customer preferences using sorting rules assigned to customer groups
Dynamic top bar messages — welcome customers clicking through a marketing email with a message that matches the email’s content, using source codes as qualifiers
Affiliate link discounts — offer unique discounts through personalised affiliate links, tracking them with source codes

Closing Thoughts

Campaigns in SFCC are a genuinely underutilised feature. The combination of customer groups, content slots, and sorting rules creates a personalisation surface that rivals purpose-built personalisation tools — at no additional licence cost.

Have a specific use case you’d like to implement? Share it in the comments and we can work through the configuration together.

Stay tuned for more in the SFCC Beyond the Basics series.