Introduction to AMPScript

AMPscript is a scripting language that you can embed within HTML emails, text emails, landing pages, SMS messages, and push notifications from Mobile Push. The system executes the script at the point where you include it in the message to render content on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis. All AMPscript functions are supported by the Salesforce Marketing Cloud application towards the end of the email send functionality. Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables users to create and manage marketing relationships and campaigns through a customer relationship management (CRM) platform catered to marketers. Please see below examples of AMPScript functions used in Salesforce Content Builder (e.g. – Salesforce Marketing Cloud):

• AttachFile
• ContentBlockByID
• ContentBlockbyName
• DataExtensionRowCount

AMPScript Functions Changes within Salesforce Content Builder

Starting mid-2019, Salesforce Content Builder will no longer support certain AMPScript functions such as: ContentArea and ContentAreaByName. Content Area produces content contained in a specified stored area (i.e. – %%=ContentArea(‘11’)=%%; system returns the content of content area 11). In contrast, ContentAreaByName produces content contained in a specified stored content area as well (i.e. – %%=ContentAreaByName(‘mycontents\NY DMV\License Plate Numbers’)=%%; system returns the content of stored area named License Plate Numbers within the NY DMV folder). Salesforce Content Builder enables users to consolidate images, documents, and content through their content management tool in Marketing Cloud.

Alternative AMPScript functions for ContentArea and ContentAreaByName

Email templates containing ContentArea and ContentAreaByName can utilize ContentBlockByName as a replacement function. ContentBlockByName produces content contained in the specified stored content block (i.e. – %%=ContentBlockByName(“ContentBuilder\NY DMV\License Plate Numbers”). The code output would be the License Plate Numbers data. Please see sample code below:

The HTML Code below will ensure that the ContentBlockByName AMPscript function returns the appropriate data for the user within Salesforce Content Builder:

HTML Code

%%[

SET @ContentName = “Content Builder\my contents\NY DMV\License Plate Numbers”

]%%

%%=ContentBlockByName(@ContentName)=%%

*Text highlighted in yellow represent the path of the folder where the data is stored in Salesforce Content Builder

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