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

SFMC native functions and WSProxy

Let's look at the functions and capabilities we can use to call these API calls. Now, the good news is that there is capability in both languages to do this. But we would very highly recommend doing most, if not all of your API calls, inside SSJS as the capabilities, functions, error handling, and parsing are so much stronger and more reliable than AMPscript for this. That being said, let's explore the native functions that are built in with an explicit HTTP method.

AMPscript

In AMPscript, there is a built-in capability to natively handle SOAP API sends (internal). For the REST API, you can use the HTTP functions to make those calls. Outside of that, the API capability is near non-existent as this is not the purpose that AMPscript was built for. For now, let's dig into the functions and get a feel for how they are best utilized.

SOAP API functions

These functions had to be created because AMPscript has no native way to handle...