Name: Introducing Emarsys Scripting Language in SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement
Uploaded: 2023-4-25
Duration: 370 s
Description: This video describes the basics of the Emarsys Scripting Language also known as ESL. Emarsys Scripting Language allows the user to create dynamic content in campaign creation.

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<div><div>This video describes the basics of the Emarsys Scripting Language also known as ESL. Emarsys Scripting Language allows the user to create dynamic content in campaign creation. </div></div>

Introducing Emarsys Scripting Language in SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement

Hello, in this video you will learn the basics of the Emarsys Scripting Language, or as we call it ESL. This is an introductory video aimed at all Emarsys users - even those who have never written code. Simply put, the Emarsys Scripting Language lets you create dynamic content in your campaigns. Although Emarsys already provides out-of-the-box personalization variables, conditional text, and block targeting solutions, with ESL you build your own personalization rules, freeing you completely from any technical dependencies. You can create rules based on various data sources. This can be contact data, like birthdate, business-specific data, such as particular product information from your relational database or any external values, like additional customer data that you don’t store in the Platform. So the customization of your content becomes easy and fully automated with ESL. Before we dive into ESL, let’s take a quick look at the basic components that come with the Platform: personalization, conditional text, and block targeting. With personalization variables, you can use your account’s system or custom fields to populate your content. For example, you can include the first name and the city that was given by your contact, so your message reads: “Hi Pierre! Get free delivery all around Paris”. In emails, we also have predefined rules to display content based on conditions which you can apply to any text content. For instance, you can show specific content depending on the gender of the contact. Finally, you can use block targeting to hide or show an entire content block depending on the conditional type you choose. For example, you can use it to display a block with a 10% discount only for your inactive customers. But what if you’d like to create more dynamic content? This is where the Emarsys Scripting Language comes in. ESL uses expressions, filters and statements to build rules that will define what content appears in your message. First, let’s look at the terminology. What is an expression, a filter, and a statement? An expression is basically the data or output you’d like to show in your message. It looks like this: An expression can be a combination of many things. It can be a constant - something fixed, like the exact date when a voucher expires, or it can be a variable: like each customer’s first name. ESL returns a value once you give it an expression. See this? This is an expression that returns the value of George. A filter is a particular rule for an expression. Use a pipe character when you want to include filters in the expression. I’ll take the first name example again. In case you don’t have the customer’s first name, you can display a fallback text by using the default filter. So if the first name field has no value in the system, display friend instead. It looks like this: If you would like to have more filters for one expression in your HTML-based email, you can combine them easily. To show the value in upper case and still have a fallback text, type the following: So far, so simple, right? A statement is a command given by you to the computer to take specific actions, and is used to describe a behavior or a logic. In the case of an IF statement, you set a condition that can be evaluated as true or false. For example: if gender equals male is true. Based on the result you define the action: if gender equals male is true, write Mr. Last Name. A statement may have internal components (for example, expressions like a personalization field). In case you need to define a statement, start it with a curly bracket, followed by a percent sign, and close it with a percent and a closing curly bracket. Between these, you need an actual statement defining what happens in all possible cases. Let me show you another example. If the first name of your contact has 6 characters or more, display the words ‘Hello friend’, otherwise display ‘Hello first name’. For that, I need to use the filter called length, which counts the length of the word. It looks like this: So if your contact is called Jonathan, the word ‘friend’ will be shown, but if the first name is just John, we can display that because it’s only 4 characters long. If you’d like to combine the two previous examples in a statement, you need to start by checking if the first name has no value, and then continue as before: So today I showed you the basics of the Emarsys Scripting Language, how it compares to the existing personalization solutions, and the required terminology. ESL helps you easily include business-specific and customer-specific information to increase the relevancy of your content. To learn more about ESL please check out our documentation pages. I hope that you enjoyed this session, and thank you for your attention!