If you asked me “how do you find segmentation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?” a few years ago, at the beginning of my experience with the tool, I would have rolled my eyes.Yes, I said it, I would have rolled my eyes. Why? Well, I am not a developer, I am not a coder and let’s say the user interface for segmentation in SFMC is quite limited compared to other technologies I have worked with in the past.Sure, we can filter data extensions, split them, clone them and potentially use data relationship to connect multiple tables and cross filter them.However, that day will…

I started working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) over two years ago. My experience with other Marketing Automation Platforms helped me grasp the concepts of SFMC quite swiftly, however, it was natural for me to compare the tools and capabilities between the platforms, sometimes finding positive enhancements, other times, unfortunately, banging my head against what I would call ‘product gaps’. Today, we are going to talk about Journey Builder. If you are not familiar with this tool, it is a visual flow that allows Marketeers to create automated multi-touch and multi-channel (Email, SMS, Push Notifications, Ads) customer journeys (think about…

Data extensions, are Salesforce Marketing Cloud name for database tables that users of marketing cloud can setup on the platform. SFMC uses under the hood a SQLServer database, whose SQL capabilities correspond to SQLServer 2005 version. Data Extensions are the objects onto which these SQL queries can be run. Data Types Text: is quite a straight forward data type. In SFMC, it has a maximum length of 4k characters. If you are trying to push a record with a text field than the length set in the data extension field, the Marketing Cloud API will reject the record and return the following…

There is normally two main ways to extract data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud in a programmatic manner. Either rely on its’ built in automation studio framework or rely on its’ SOAP API to query some of its’ datasets. Automation Data Extracts Data extracts are setup within Automation Studio, and can be used to exports certain events such key activity metrics such as Bounces, Clicks, Conversion etc… Setting up a data extract is based on two parts 1) A schedule 2) A data extract Activity Schedule To setup the schedule, just drag and drop the “schedule” icon onto the starting source column and press configure. Once you…

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) has two different API types in use: a Rest API and a SOAP API. Within the Python ecosystem, a library called FuelSDK integrates with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs. With it, it is possible to integrate directly with SFMC. It is also possible to use automation within Salesforce Marketing Cloud to pick up data from an FTP here; however, I will focus on data integration using SFMC’s REST API. Pushing data to Salesforce Marketing Cloud usually happen in two flavors: A call to a data extension endpoint A call to a trigger send endpoint. A data extension in SFMC is a data repository…

In Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder, when entering contacts via API in commercial emails, previously, only one contact could be included per request. However, with the Winter ’24 release, a new Batch Event API has been introduced, enabling the entry of up to 100 contacts per request. ▶ Interaction: Enter Contacts into a Journey in BatchesSalesforce DevelopersCreate an entry event that asynchronously inserts a batch of subscribers into a journey.developer.salesforce.com Please enter the information as follows. This sample serves as an example of entering three contacts with a single request. --- MethodPOST--- HeadersContent-Type: application/jsonAuthorization: Bearer [Access Token]--- Endpoint[REST Base URL].rest.marketingcloudapis.com/interaction/v1/async/events--- Body (Sample){…

In the ever-evolving landscape of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, developers often grapple with the challenge of efficiently extracting contact lists from specific journey activities. While Data Views offer a solution for email activities, the elusive task of extracting contacts who traverse wait activities remains a puzzle. In the pursuit of this extraction, a workaround emerged: the setup of an “Update Contact” activity on the Journey Builder path. This involved crafting a mechanism to accumulate contacts passing through that activity into a data extension. Yet, this approach came with its own set of challenges. The “Update Contact” activity necessitated advance preparation on…

In some companies, there are cases where a central team at the headquarters sends out emails to customers managed by various branches. In situations where you want customers to reply to the received emails and have the ability to reply to the email addresses of each branch, it can be convenient to dynamically set the reply-to email addresses for each branch. At first glance, it may seem that Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s standard features allow you to select only one reply-to email address. However, it is possible to achieve dynamic reply-to addresses. Note that this feature is not enabled by default,…

One of the most critical knowledge that marketers must have is a clear vision of how to launch a campaign and an accurate understanding of how to measure performance. That being pointed out, in this article, we’ll go over one of the most important settings to make when tracking metrics in Email Studio’s engagement report. If this is not a new topic to you, I’m sure you’ve seen these unusual numbers of clicks in the engagement report for just one record, for example. And, like me, you might be wondering why and how someone might have clicked on a specific…

This function ‘upserts’ a Contact in Marketing Cloud. If the Contact does not already exist, then a new record is created. If the Contact exists, then the record is updated. The function will output 1 if an error occurred when upserting the Contact and 0 if the upsert was successful. Example The following example inserts or updates a mobile Contact record. Output A value of 0 is set by the function, indicating that no errors occurred.