In this post, we will cover how to suppress the email sends to a specific set of Subscribers using Exclusion scripts. The Exclusion script is an optional section displayed when configuring an email send, where the AMPscript expressions can be added. The records are evaluated against the condition defined and if they result in ‘true’, they are excluded from the send. This feature is available in the following applications: 1. Content Builder Go to Email Studio Under the Content Builder Emails tab, click on the email that needs to be sent On the top-right, click on the ‘Send’ button While…

The Sender Authentication Package (SAP) helps your subscribers to identify your brand and increases awareness about your brand. SAP provides a collection of features designed to help ensure that your email messages reach the inboxes of the intended recipients. SAP Features : 1. Private Domain : This feature assigns a domain used to send email. The domain acts as a “From address” for all your email sends to solidify your reputation and further your brand at the same time. Marketing Cloud authenticates all email sends using the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Sender ID, and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to prevent…

There are a lot of different ID’s across Marketing Cloud. Definitions are scattered across various pages of documentation and their interplay can be a little confusing. Here are my compiled notes to be used in conjunction with the official documentation… MID: short for Marketing Cloud Member ID. These are the digits next to your business unit names in an Enterprise Account when you hover over the business unit selection from the drop down. SubscriberID: System generated unique subscriber identifier associated with attribute set. SubscriberKey: Customer specified unique subscriber identifier that allows subscribers to change their email address and still retain tracking and preference data. Once…

Aggregate functions allow us to group multiple rows of data by some defining characteristic of the group, such as job department or month, so that summary statistics about the group (averages, totals, maximums etc.) can be calculated. The output is a single value which is based on the set of values in the source data. There are five aggregate functions, namely; SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX and COUNT. These aggregate functions are used in conjunction with the GROUP BY and HAVING clauses as part of our SELECT statement. The GROUP BY clause will divide the rows of a table into groups that have identical values in one or more columns.…

The CloudPagesURL() function provides a secure and efficient way to link out to CloudPages from email messages. <a href="%%=RedirectTo(CloudPagesURL(4132))=%%">Click HERE</a> It generates a URL link to the landing page with an encrypted query string appended —meaning no subscriber information is passed in clear text. https://pub.s10.exacttarget.com/1qVt23cf?qs=92fcbe6d03c54df75b03c7d674f2e836 This encrypted query string (?qs=______) references the email and allows standard system personalisation strings to be used on a landing page.Personalisation Strings | Training | SalesforceThese tables include available personalisation strings for usehelp.salesforce.com When using the RedirectTo(CloudPagesURL(1234)) function, I was curious if it was required to use requestParameter, queryParameter, or possiblyAttributeValue(). In fact, it is A LOT simpler than that. As…

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…