#ampscript

[huywho]

Add Anchor "Jump" Tags To Email

A Jump Link is used when the destination anchor of a link is an element within an HTML document.

In Email, be sure all jump links have the appropriate id AND name value so it jumps to the correct content containing that same value in the href attribute on every email client.

<a href="#JumpLinkSection" alias="Jump Link">Jump To Jump Link Section</a>

The value must contain a pound sign(#) before the value name in the href field

<td align="center" valign="top" id="JumpLinkSection"><a href="http://replace.com" name="JumpLinkSection" alias="Jump Link Section">This is the Jump Link Section!</a></td>

The id attribute must be in the <td> tag containing the jump content

The name attribute must be within the <a> tag containing the jump content

There are certain clients that support either the id or name attribute and some that support no anchor links at all such as AOL and Android 2.3.

Sources:

W3C Recommendations

Campaign Monitor - Tips & Resources

[ayaninsights]

Advanced AMPscript For Marketing Cloud Emails- AYAN INSIGHTS

Explore advanced AMPscript techniques for dynamic email personalization, including logic, data lookups, loops, and engagement-based messagin

Advanced AMPscript techniques to power highly dynamic, data-driven email personalization and boost engagement with conditional logic, relational lookups, fallback handling, loops, and behavior-based messaging.

[doberty]

Problem with AMPScript Lookup() in Cloud Pages

I have recently stumbled upon a particular limitation in SFMC AMPScript Lookup() function that I thought was interesting to markdown and share.

Namely, I was trying to look up a field in my data extension in a very ordinary way, checking that every field and data extension existed, but Lookup() would make my Cloud Page hang in the preview or throw Error 500 when published. It was a peculiar situation.

In the SFMC database, the lookup key field does not have an explicit length limit. It might have been the first time I've seen this, but it appears the UI allows the creation of MAX length fields by setting length to "-1".

Given the database SFMC is running on, the MAX equivalent for a text field is going to be 4000 characters. We may be able to work around this error by creating text fields with length set explicitly to that number, which achieves the same result or use another lookup key that has the length defined, which is what I ended up doing.

I took that expression and placed it in a CloudPage in a test account and was able to do a lookup on a text field of length 4000. Meanwhile, the preview wouldn't even load when I set the field length implicitly.

To cut a long story short, after some research and a chat with Salesforce support, I concluded the following:

"The Data Extension Key field for a Lookup function call is invalid. The key field has a MAX or unlimited length. Fields with MAX or unlimited length cannot be used as keys."

var @acid, @email, @dateOfBirth 

set @acid = AttributeValue("acid") 

if not empty(@acid) then   

set @email = Lookup("MAIN SUBSCRIBER", "EMAILADDRESS", "ACIDKEY", @acid)   

set @dateOfBirth = Lookup("MAIN SUBSCRIBER", "BIRTHDATE", "ACIDKEY", @acid) 

endif

[huywho]

Set a Variable for an Expiration Date

You can make an expiration date a variable that changes based on send date with AMPScript. Just use the DateAdd function to increase the date however far you need to:

set @expiration_date = DateAdd(Now(), "14", "D")

This makes the expiration date 14 days after the send. So if the email deploys 7/01/2017 it will have an expiration date of 7/15/2017.

[huywho]

Hiding content on forward to a friend

%%[if _messagecontext != "ftaf" then]%%

content hidden on forward to a friend 

%%[endif]%%

[huywho]

Hiding content on web

%%[if _messagecontext != "vawp" then]%%

content hidden on web 

%%[endif]%%

[huywho]

Casing

%%=ProperCase(variable)=%% %%=UpperCase(variable)=%% %%=LowerCase(variable)=%%

[huywho]

Pull in a date

Current Year

%%=Format(Now(), "yyyy")=%%

Date that will update continually

%%=Format(Now(), "MM/dd/YYYY")=%%

Date that is hard set from time of send

%%=Format(Now(true), "MM/dd/YYYY")=%%

Date plus days

%%=Format(DateAdd(Now(true), "14", "D"), "MM/dd/yyyy")=%%