Marketing personalization is hard, but Salesforce AMPscript makes it easier.
In my last post, I cautioned about the workload from exponential personalization. In this post, I’m going to celebrate an approach that Salesforce Marketing Cloud has developed that helps reduce that workload – AMPscript! The exponential personalization warning still stands, but…we’re marketers, and it’s so cool to personalize to the individual level. My team runs campaigns with hundreds of variations, and AMPScript is our newest, most important tool in our toolbelt.
What is AMPscript? According to Trailhead: “AMPscript is Marketing Cloud’s proprietary scripting language for advanced dynamic content in emails, landing pages, SMS, and push messages.” I won’t go into the nitty gritty of how to use AMPscript here, but I will sing it’s praises. At the end of this article, I highlight some of my favorite AMPscript resources that can help you use AMPscript like a pro.
My team supports insurance communications, and there are a lot of variations in our messages to personalize and advise on next best actions. Customer data is the backbone of these variations. Traditionally, we work very closely with our data engineers to transform and flatten data into discrete data fields with values that our marketing systems can easily reference. With AMPscript, we are able to transform data ourselves! That’s a HUGE win for us!
There are a lot of ways to use AMPscript in your messages, and we’ve experimented with most of them. We typically divide our team into two camps:
- General Marketers that use personalization and inline AMPscript
- Marketing Technologists that use AMPscript blocks and tags
For these camps, job title doesn’t matter. We have marketing managers, communication specialists, and developers we consider Marketing Technologists. The camps are based on knowledge and skill. Anyone can become proficient with AMPscript!
Building out email variations can be challenging, and proofing those can be just as challenging. This is where I really appreciate the ability of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to reference Test Data Extensions for bulk test sends, and for Gmail to allow multiple task-specific aliases in one inbox. A quick and easy way to generate all test variations in one place to proof! Someone still needs to verify the information in each of those messages…but at least it’s easy to generate tests!
If you’re ready to try AMPscript, here are some of my favorite resources:
- AMPscript for Marketers – Trailhead
- Get Started with AMPscript – Salesforce Developer Documentation
- AMPscript Style Guide – Mateusz Dabrowski
Do you have other favorite AMPscript guides? Has AMPscript been helpful for your campaigns? Share your experience in the comments below!
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