Review Content Complexity
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Review your email content for performance impacts.
- Describe best practices for using AMPscript.
- Identify reasons to use Guided Template Language.
Review Your Email Content
In addition to data in multiple places, using complex scripting to personalize content or manipulate send-time data can increase email send speed—often dramatically. The more complex an email is, the slower it is to be built per subscriber. This may not be a concern for small audiences, but a few extra seconds per subscribers becomes hours for large audiences. Going back to campaign goals, some emails warrant a complexity review and others do not. If you need to improve send times to meet a campaign goal, it’s time to analyze your email content.
Consider the Impact of Content Personalization
Just like audience data, content data can be preloaded into one data extension to reduce the time needed to process the send. If your email is pulling data from multiple data extensions to create complex personalized emails, it’s likely an opportunity to streamline.
Marketing Cloud Engagement allows for highly personalized emails, including emails using JavaScript, AMP for Email, Guided Template Language (GTL), and, of course, AMPscript. Flexibility in email coding allows for great content for your customers. But when it comes to email send performance, highly personalized, complex content can slow your sends down. Personalization is a powerful tool to connect with your audience, but keep in mind how it can affect your email send time. It’s all about finding a balance based on your campaign goals. As a reminder, let’s review the levels of content complexity based on a Content Builder email.
- Static: A static email includes a single block of HTML-based content with no personalization.
- Simple: A simple email includes a single block of HTML-based content with some personalization for each subscriber, added at the time of send.
- Moderate: A moderate email uses up to 3 HTML-based content blocks. At the time of send, data found in a data extension not in the send’s audience is reviewed and added to the email as personalized content for a specific subscriber.
- Advanced: An advanced email has more than 5 HTML-based content blocks. It includes multiple personalization substitutions, uses impression regions, and multiple data extension lookups.
Where does your email land on this scale? If you need to improve performance, you can start by reviewing the number of substitutions and content blocks in your email. Focus on quality over quantity. Review your content and select only the most important areas to personalize. Can any be removed without losing the important aspects of your email? Don’t get frustrated if you aren’t able to reduce complexity. Not all advanced emails can be simplified. Again it’s a matter of focusing on what is the most important aspect of your campaign—advanced, personalized content or fast processing times. Once you have evaluated the content, it’s time to look at your code.
Take a Look at Your Email’s Code
Selecting a programmatic language is often based on developer preference or knowledge. But when focused on email send optimization, it can be beneficial to spend time reviewing your code and seeing if there’s another way of achieving the same result. In some cases, you can improve performance by switching from one coding language to another. So as you’re looking to improve performance, it’s worth testing languages to see what optimizes your specific email. Let’s review Salesforce’s proprietary languages: AMPscript and Guided Template Language.
AMPscript
As you probably are aware, AMPscript is a Salesforce proprietary scripting language that interacts with Marketing Cloud Engagement emails, landing pages, SMS and MMS messages, and push notifications. AMPscript can help you:
- Add personalized, unique content for each subscriber.
- Display content based on certain conditions.
- Format data values.
- Search and retrieve relational data in multiple data extensions.
Overall it’s a great language for personalization and pulling data from a data extension into an email. As it relates to send performance, it’s important to review your AMPscript data extension functions. To help with processing, limit the number of Lookup, UpdateDE, and InsertDE functions in your email code, as they can lower send performance. Be more efficient and use LookupRows to get more data at one time.
Guide Template Language (GTL)
AMPscript’s younger sibling, GTL, is Marketing Cloud Engagement’s newest programmatic language. GTL can be used to create personalized, repeatable content blocks and templates that are data-driven. And you can create these using fewer lines of code than with AMPscript.
GTL performs best when you need to parse JSON data with little data manipulation. Wait, who’s Jason? JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. JSON’s main use is the storage or transmission of data from servers to apps (using an API call, for example).
Test It Out
Many email coders also use Server-Side JavaScript (SSJS). While it can offer similar coding features and functionality to AMPscript and GTL, using a Marketing Cloud Engagement language can often streamline your email builds and increase throughput. That being said, in some cases, SSJS can have equivalent performance. The main takeaway is regardless of what language you choose, it’s important to evaluate all coding languages to see what is going to work best for your campaign.
Intrigued by coding languages? Learn more in the module, Marketing Cloud Engagement Programmatic Languages.
Now that we’ve reviewed audience data and content complexity, let’s head to the next unit where we walk through an example and make some campaign updates to improve send speed performance.
