If you’re new to Marketing Cloud Engagement, you may be feeling overwhelmed. Salesforce’s powerful marketing platform can do a lot. And that comes with a steep learning curve.
I’ve been on my Marketing Cloud Engagement journey for a while now and still feel the sense of having so much to learn. My learning journey has consisted of hands-on experience, boot camp-style training courses, and of course, all the Trailheads.
Florida Dreamin’ Session – How to Write like a Marketer: Intro to AMPscript for Salesforce Marketing Cloud
I knew when I was given the opportunity to attend this year’s Florida Dreamin’, finding Marketing Cloud Engagement sessions was at the top of my event bucket list. That’s why I was super excited to attend Tatiana Romanko’s presentation, How to Write like a Marketer: Intro to AMPscript for Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Romanko took a complex topic and simplified it, making her content easy to understand by providing real-world use cases every marketer could relate to. This session was a great introduction to AMPSprcipt for Marketing Cloud Engagement users who are still on that learning curve, and even seasoned veterans took away a thing or two.
What I especially loved about her session is that, like me, Romanko doesn’t have a coding background. Her message really resonated with me: with hard work and hands-on experience, you too can learn the technical intricacies of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
What is AMPScript?
Before jumping right into a complex topic, Romanko set the stage with a quick introduction to AMPscript. “AMPscript is Marketing Cloud’s proprietary scripting language for advanced dynamic content in emails, landing pages, SMS, and push messages.”
“AMPscript expands Marketing Cloud functionality to help you create the one-to-one, personalized communications that are so coveted by digital marketers. https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/ampscript-for-nondevelopers/get-to-know-ampscript)
AMPscript is used to:
- Personalize emails using subscriber or contact data.
- Create complex, highly dynamic emails using conditional logic.
- Clean and format data.
- Add real-time information to emails such as date or time.
- Track impressions.”
What is AMPScript used for in Marketing Cloud Engagement?
AMPScript does a lot. At Sercante, we use it to help our clients with personalizing their emails, creating dynamic content, and much more. What I liked about Romanko’s session is that she really honed in on three common use cases that every marketer can relate to.
Personalization
If you’re a marketer, you already know the power of personalization. One study found that emails featuring personalized subjects are 50% more likely to be opened. AMPScript in Marketing Cloud Engagement allows you to use your subscriber data to personalize your marketing.
Creating a personalized greeting in Marketing Cloud Engagement through a personalization string isn’t complicated. What I liked about Romanko’s use case is she focused on something I often times see clients overlook: what happens when you don’t have a subscriber’s first name? In this case, we could use AMPscript to set a generic value (Customer) as our greeting if we don’t have this data.
Formatting Your Data
As a marketer, I’ve seen customers input their data in every way imaginable. Romanko gave the example of asking someone to provide their favorite color. In this instance, we could get a few different variations:
- Pink
- pink
- PINK
So what happens when we go to pull this data into an email? It could end up looking like we either don’t know our basic grammar, or come across like we are YELLING at our reader.
Romanko highlighted AMPScript’s ProperCase function here, “which capitalizes the first letter in the specified string and any other letters in the string that follow any character other than a letter. It converts all other letters into lowercase.”
AMPScript Resources
As you can see, Romanko gave some great use cases for using AMPScript. She also provided her audience with some really great resources on where to go to learn more:
Soak in all the lessons learned at Florida Dreamin’
Be sure to check out these other posts from my fellow dragons who attended Florida Dreamin’ with me and shared details about their favorite sessions there.
- The Art of Delivering Empathetic and Joyful User Experiences | Catherine Williams
- Florida Dreamin’: A Conference Where Soft Skills Shine | Abbey Freund
