Salesforce is one of the biggest names in digital marketing, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is among the premier email marketing programs for reaching a large, personalized audience at scale.
While SFMC is typically regarded as fairly easy to use, there’s still a seemingly endless number of tips that can make email creation that much easier and save users precious time.
Save time on your email creation with these expert SFMC insights.
Set your default login preference
It’s a small thing, but it adds up. Under Cloud Preferences in Settings, you can set a default login screen — so instead of clicking through to Mobile Studio or Content Builder every morning, you land there automatically. Log in, hover over your username, select Default Login Preference, choose your app, and save. Thirty seconds once, one less click every day.
Develop Cloudpages in an external environment
Working directly in SFMC means every iteration requires a full save-and-publish cycle. When you’re developing a Cloudpage, keep a working version in an outside, publicly accessible environment — like Dropbox — that you reference inside the Cloudpage. That way you can live-refresh the page without copying, pasting, saving, and publishing for every change. Keeping a working version externally and a stable “ready” version inside SFMC gives you the freedom to iterate without the risk of publishing half-finished work.
Master AMPscript for dynamic personalization
Personalization is where SFMC earns its keep — and AMPscript is how you unlock it beyond the basics.
Most teams start with Personalization Strings (inserting subscriber attributes like first name into email content). Fewer take the next step into Dynamic Content, which displays different content blocks based on rules you define using subscriber attributes or data extension values. The difference in performance is significant: brands that use dynamic personalized content see a 43:1 ROI from email, compared to 12:1 for brands that don’t.
A few practices that matter here:
- Use Code Snippet Blocks in Content Builder rather than embedding AMPscript directly into HTML. Code snippets don’t add extra markup, which keeps your code cleaner and your rendering more reliable.
- Limit Lookup functions where possible. Each lookup against a large data extension adds latency to your sends. Merge data into a single sendable data extension before send time when you can.
- Document your personalization logic. If the plan exists only in one person’s head, it becomes a bottleneck every time that person isn’t available.
Leverage Einstein AI for smarter sends
Einstein AI is embedded across Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and most teams use only a fraction of what it offers.
The most impactful applications for email teams:
- Send-time optimization: Einstein analyzes each subscriber’s engagement history to determine the best time to deliver their email. Not the best average time — the best time for them.
- Subject line optimization: Einstein GPT can generate and test subject line variants based on historical performance data.
- Product recommendations: Leverage Einstein to dynamically recommend products or content based on individual behavior, updated at the time of send — not at the time of build.
The bigger picture here is that AI in email marketing is only as useful as the data and governance structure underneath it. Einstein surfaces insights from your data; it’s up to your team to make sure that data is clean, segmented correctly, and flowing into the right journeys.
A/B test more than just subject lines
A/B testing in SFMC is straightforward — you create two versions of an email, send each to a sample of your audience, and let the winning version go to the remainder automatically. Most teams apply this to subject lines. The high-performing teams apply it to almost everything.
Things worth testing that often get skipped:
- Sender name and sender address
- Preheader text
- Primary CTA copy and placement
- Email length
- Dynamic vs. static content for specific segments
- Send time (in addition to Einstein optimization)
The tracking reports in SFMC give you real-time performance data — open rates, click-through rates, conversions — so you’re not guessing at what’s working. Use them systematically, not just to report out, but to feed back into the next build.
Keep your IP warm — and your deliverability intact
IP reputation is one of the unglamorous pillars of email marketing performance. An IP with a poor reputation means your emails go to spam before anyone has the chance to open them.
A few signals to check if you’re concerned about your IP health:
- Is this IP sending messages with large file sizes or attachments that are slow to download?
- Is this IP keeping connections open for unusually long periods?
- Is this IP address listed on any blocklists?
If you’ve hit a reputation problem, warm your IP by gradually increasing send volume — keeping sends to fewer than 20,000 emails per day to a single domain while you rebuild reputation. Encourage subscribers to mark your emails as “not spam,” and focus on engagement: recipients opening and clicking through is one of the strongest signals to inbox providers that your emails belong in the inbox.
Prevention is simpler than recovery. Keep file sizes lean, avoid spam trigger language, and maintain clean lists.
Organize with Business Units
If your organization operates across multiple brands, regions, or products, Business Units are one of the most underused organizational tools in SFMC.
Business Units allow you to separate assets, audiences, and permissions by team — so the team managing campaigns for one product line isn’t accidentally touching assets that belong to another. For agencies managing multiple clients inside a single SFMC instance, this is even more critical.
The time saved isn’t in the setup. It’s in the hours you don’t spend chasing down the wrong version of an asset or untangling a permission conflict three weeks into a campaign.
Integrate Stensul with SFMC for Governed Creation™
SFMC is a powerful sending and personalization platform. What it isn’t — and doesn’t claim to be — is a Governed Creation™ environment. Email creation inside the platform alone requires technical expertise, and when multiple contributors are involved, inconsistency creeps in fast.
Stensul’s integration with SFMC closes that gap. Any email creator — not just technical ones — can build on-brand, mobile-responsive, inbox-tested emails using Stensul’s drag-and-drop interface, with your DAM, workflow tools, real-time personalization, and analytics all connected in one place. When the email is approved, it uploads to SFMC in a single click.
The integration handles the details that usually create friction:
- Author Dynamic Content modules tied to custom segments based on your SFMC data extensions
- Preview Dynamic Content assets directly inside the Stensul builder before anything goes live
- Upload HTML to SFMC folders — including subject line, preheader text, and optional Business Units — via secure API
- Push final, approved emails to SFMC without copying, pasting, or manually re-entering content
The result is that emails arrive in SFMC already approved, already on-brand, and ready to send. The review cycle shrinks because there’s less to review. And the handoff that usually costs your team hours disappears entirely.
Teams using Stensul + SFMC together reduce campaign creation time by up to 90%. Request a demo to see how it works.
The bottom line
SFMC rewards teams who invest in the right habits early. Default preferences, governed templates, clean AMPscript, and a disciplined testing practice — these aren’t shortcuts. They’re the foundation that makes speed sustainable.
The teams that struggle in SFMC aren’t struggling because the platform is hard. They’re struggling because the process around it hasn’t caught up with the volume it’s being asked to support.
Fix the process, and the platform does what it was built to do.
