Marketing Cloud used to have Playbooks to create common campaigns such as on-boarding, anniversary, or birthday emails. I never used Playbooks which eventually have been retired and replaced by Journey Builder templates.
To create a simple Birthday campaign I used Automation Studio as follows:
- Create a Birthday Segment and a SQL Query Activity to import data daily
- Create a Birthday Email and a Send Email Activity to send an email daily
- Create an Automation and schedule it to run daily
SQL Query Activity
A date of birth needs to be imported as an attribute in All Subscribers or a column in Data Extension. You can compare the day and the month from the birthday date to today’s date values. Assuming that both are represented by the same data type (Date) it is relatively easy. Make sure this Date Extension Is Sendable - you will send the Birthday emails to this list.
I covered a scenario with some data conversions in this post.
Send Email Activity
Create a nice, personalized Birthday email, test, and use it for for the Send Email Activity.
Automation
Create a scheduled automation to run daily in the morning (for example at 7 am). In the first step you run SQL query to overwrite data in the Birthday segment and in step two send the Birthday email.