Category: AMPScript

Is it Daylight Savings?

2023-10-252024-03-08AMPScript, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Here’s an AMPscript snippet to determine if a date falls in the Daylight Savings period as defined by NIST.gov:

Output:dateToCheck: 2023-10-25 month: 10 day: 25 dayOfWeekToFind: Wed dayOfWeekNum: 4 prevSunday: isDST: 1

Try it yourself with multiple dates: https://mcsnippets.herokuapp.com/s/KcEDbfxA

NOTE: this doesn’t handle times, but could be expanded to do so.

Two-Click Unsubscribe with AMPscript

2022-02-282022-03-02AMPScript, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

With additional scrutiny on outbound links in corporate inboxes these days, one-click unsubscribe pages aren’t always a good idea — any visit from a click will result in an immediate action. In the case of a one-click unsubscribe page, it’s an opt-out. That’s no good.

Here’s an example of a two-click unsubscribe page that requires an additional click to confirm the subscriber’s desire to unsubscribe (or not).

Visit from email

Unsubscribe

Nevermind

The code

As always, if you have any feedback, questions or find any issues with this, feel free to drop me note on the contact page or via comment down below.

My Baby Shark AMPscript Challenge Variations

2020-10-272021-06-14AMPScript, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

It’s been a few months since the judging wrapped up for the Baby Shark AMPscript Challenge on HowToSFMC. The goal was to use AMPscript to output the lyrics of Baby Shark (EARWORM WARNING). There were a few of categories for submissions, but I read them all as “with as little code as possible”. Obstinate fixation… engage!

To be completely honest, I spent way too much time obsessing over my own solution — enjoying every moment. Shortest I got on my own was 260 characters. Here are my 7 variations:

1a. 260 characters, compressed

1b. 260 characters, uncompressed

2. Single loop & mod

3. Single loop, mod & math

4. Double loop, string parse

5. String char loop

6. String concatenate loop

7. Multiple concat loop

What I learned

The output and outputline functions weirdly require other functions like v or concat.
The variable isn’t required for the for-loop next directive
I should never, ever write something like this for a client.
There are some incredibly talented people in this developer community! I was amazed at some of the entries. The whole thing was super-difficult to judge.

HTML Formatting with Regular Expressions

2020-01-272020-01-29AMPScript, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Here’s a brief video covering a little trick I use to format HTML in preparation for use in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These are the patterns:

To enable the regular expression option in the search bar, click this button (or use Alt-R):

Links:

Selecting random data extension rows with AMPscript

2019-11-152019-12-31AMPScript, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

In a triggered send scenario, there’s no chance to leverage query activities to prepare auxiliary data for display in an email. I recently had this request from a client:

Display a random set 6 of the products in a specific data extension in the body of this email.

That’s tricky with AMPscript since you can only retrieve ordered rows based on fields and values already in the data extension (e.g you can’t order by GUID(), random() or _customObjectKey with the lookup functions). There are also no arrays or sorting outside of the rowset lookup functions in AMPscript.

Here’s a solution that worked for me:

DataExtensionTest

EmailAddress	SubscriberKey	FirstName	LookupKey
doug@limedash.com	8473	Doug	1
suzy@limedash.com	5497	Suzy	1
dale@limedash.com	7114	Dale	1
barb@limedash.com	5767	Barb	1
curt@limedash.com	5152	Curt	1
nora@limedash.com	7014	Nora	1
leon@limedash.com	8225	Leon	1
lily@limedash.com	9496	Lily	1

(NOTE: I added a lookupKey column to my data extension with a default value to facilitate retrieving all of the rows)

Output 1

arr(1): {2}{6}{7}{4}{8}{3}{5}{1} arr(2): 5497|7014|8225|5767|9496|7114|5152|8473 subscriberkey1: 5497, firstName: Suzy subscriberkey2: 7014, firstName: Nora subscriberkey3: 8225, firstName: Leon subscriberkey4: 5767, firstName: Barb subscriberkey5: 9496, firstName: Lily subscriberkey6: 7114, firstName: Dale subscriberkey7: 5152, firstName: Curt subscriberkey8: 8473, firstName: Doug

Output2

arr(1): {7}{3}{5}{6}{8}{1}{2}{4} arr(2): 8225|7114|5152|7014|9496|8473|5497|5767 subscriberkey1: 8225, firstName: Leon subscriberkey2: 7114, firstName: Dale subscriberkey3: 5152, firstName: Curt subscriberkey4: 7014, firstName: Nora subscriberkey5: 9496, firstName: Lily subscriberkey6: 8473, firstName: Doug subscriberkey7: 5497, firstName: Suzy subscriberkey8: 5767, firstName: Barb

I’m sure there are other ways of approaching this. Know of a simpler way or an alternate approach? Please share!