What is AMPscript used for in Salesforce? What is its purpose?

AMPscript is a useful scripting language that you can use across emails, landing pages, SMS, and push notifications in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Builders.

AMPscript is Marketing Cloud‘s proprietary scripting language for advanced dynamic content in emails, landing pages, SMS, and push messages.

Why use Marketing Cloud AMPscript?

AMPscript allows you to extend Marketing Cloud functionality beyond its out-of-the-box capabilities because you can develop code and custom solutions, tailored to your own specific needs and requirements.

What are some functions you can perform with AMPscript?

Types of Functions in Marketing Cloud AMPscript:

  • Data Functions: Lookup: Retrieves a value from a Data Extension. LookupRows: Retrieves multiple rows from a Data Extension based on specified criteria. 
  • String Functions: Concat : Concatenates text strings. 
  • Math Functions: Add : Adds two numbers.

What are advantages of AMPscript compared to Ssjs?

For the web developer who are new to both languages, for them AMPscript has a shorter learning curve compared to SSJS. AMPscript should be preferred for simple inline personalization, which includes content like name, salutation and simple IF ELSE loops.

Marketing Cloud AMPscript

Using AMPscript

To use AMPscript, you insert it into the content body of your messages at the point where you want it to render. When you send a message that contains AMPscript, Marketing Cloud Engagement interprets the code and substitutes it with the output of the AMPscript function.

3 Way to Add

There are three ways to add AMPscript code to your content: by using inline code, by adding code blocks, or by using tag-based scripting. The first two of these methods use special delimiters to denote the beginning and ending of the code that you want Marketing Cloud Engagement to interpret. In the third method, you delineate the AMPscript code with <script> tags.

When you close an AMPscript block, use the same type of closing delimiter as you used to open the block. For example, if you open a block using tag-based scripting, you can’t close it by using the closing code block delimiter.

Use the %%= and =%% delimiters to add AMPscript code inline with your content. Inline AMPscript is frequently used within HTML tags to dynamically populate the content of a message. In this basic example, a section of AMPscript is included inline within an HTML <p> tag.

You can also include multi-line blocks of AMPscript code in your messages. Use the %%[ and ]%% delimiters to begin and end a code block, respectively. With a code block, you can define multiple variables and execute multiple functions. Code blocks use the syntax shown in this example.

Tag-based syntax for AMPscript standardizes the syntax used to declare AMPscript blocks with the syntax of Server-Side JavaScript (SSJS). This syntax makes it easier for developers to switch between AMPscript and SSJS.

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