Book Image

Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud

By : Greg Gifford, Jason Hanshaw
Book Image

Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud

By: Greg Gifford, Jason Hanshaw

Overview of this book

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) allows you to use multiple channels and tools to create a 1:1 marketing experience for your customers and subscribers. Through automation and helper tasks, you can greatly increase your productivity while also reducing the level of effort required in terms of volume and frequency. Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud starts by discussing what automation is generally and then progresses to what automation is in SFMC. After that, you’ll focus on how to perform automation inside of SFMC all the way to fully running processes and capabilities from an external service. Later chapters explore the benefits and capabilities of automation and having an automation mindset both within and outside of SFMC. Equipped with this knowledge and example code, you'll be prepared to maximize your SFMC efficiency. By the end of this Salesforce book, you’ll have the skills you need to build automation both inside and outside of SFMC, along with the knowledge for using the platform optimally.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Automation Theory and Automations in SFMC
5
Section 2: Optimizing Automation inside of SFMC
11
Section 3: Optimizing the Automation of SFMC from External Sources
17
Section 4: Conclusion

Overview of SSJS in Marketing Cloud

Let's start with an explanation of what SSJS is. SSJS is basically a server-run version of JavaScript to interact with the server and related objects. As it is not run in the browser (client side), it does not have access to the Document Object Model (DOM) or similar aspects. Before getting too much further into SSJS, we wanted to address the topic itself.

Now, although we are a huge fans and lover a of SSJS, there are many people out there who avoid the topic at all costs or even just refuse to admit it exists. Our thought is that there is a stigma that has been put on this language that causes people to view it as a dead language in Marketing Cloud, or at least a less useful one.

This stigma has likely stemmed from the fact that AMPscript is newer, easier to use— especially for email personalization—and can be more efficient. This is what is touted around as the reason SSJS is not so great. Although all those points are...