Salesforce Marketing Cloud's Guide Template Language for Dynamic Email Personalisation

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Guide Template Language (GTL) makes advanced, dynamic email customisation possible. One great way to use GTL is when you’re getting a json request, the individual values in that json payload can be used to customise your emails. If you’re still with me, read on.

>> Click here for Past Meetup Videos

>> Click here for the main event page for the London Salesforce Marketing Cloud User Group

The 3rd London Salesforce Marketing Cloud Meetup took place on Sept 14. Many thanks to Michael Parker of Synapri for hosting the event with a fantastic venue, pizza and plenty of drinks!

Eliot Harper is a Salesforce MVP and a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultant based in Melbourne, Australia, and his talk was on Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Guide Template Language.

We all know AMPscript is the most popular way to personalise your messages, but that is a scripting language.

Guide Template Language (GTL) is a powerful templating language in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that enables you to build highly personalised, dynamic, data-driven messages with ease. Guide simplifies interaction with content and data, particularly when using JSON.

By using GTL, you can create templates which contain elements that define personalisation within the message which include contact attributes and dynamic informations.

GTL is based on Mustache.js and Handlebars.js templating libraries, so it will support valid templates from either of those libraries!

In this video, you will learn:

Guide Template Language is most suited for non-complex data structures and facilitates rapid template development.
Potential scenarios where you would use GTL include transactional emails (e.g. eCommerce or database emails) or content-based files like weather or twitter feeds. Just make sure your weather feed is working properly, or it will show “0” degrees!
The overall benefit of using GTL and AMPscript over journey builder is the speed in which you can make changes to targeted communication.

Here is the video: