How to use Draftship with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Drop a Draftship export into Content Builder, wire AMPscript personalization onto your data extension, and pick the right sender profile so your email leaves Marketing Cloud without IP authentication errors.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is the most flexible enterprise marketing platform on the list and the easiest one to misconfigure on send. The flexibility comes from AMPscript, a server-side templating language that runs at send time against any data extension you can write a SQL query against. The misconfigurations come from the same place: AMPscript errors don't stop the send, they just leave broken markup in inboxes.
If you've designed in Draftship, the path through SFMC is straightforward as long as you stay in Content Builder's code editor and keep AMPscript additions thin.
Where SFMC accepts pasted HTML
In Email Studio, navigate to Content Builder → Create → Email Message → Code View. Paste the Draftship export. Save. The code view is the only place that respects your HTML byte-for-byte. The drag-drop layout will rewrap your tables in their grid and break VML.
Personalization syntax in SFMC
SFMC supports four personalization layers. Pick one and stick with it; mixing them in one template is how you get broken merges.
| Layer | Example | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Substitution strings | %%FirstName%% | Subscriber attributes only. Cheap. |
| AMPscript | %%[ var @first = AttributeValue("FirstName") ]%% | Data extension lookups, conditional logic. |
| Handlebars (transactional) | {{FirstName}} | Used by the REST API for transactional sends. |
| GTL (Guide Template Language) | {{name}} | Newer JSON-based templating, less common. |
For most Draftship-to-SFMC handoffs, you'll use AMPscript at the top of the email and substitution strings inline. Map Draftship variables like this:
| Draftship | SFMC AMPscript |
|---|---|
{{ first_name }} | %%FirstName%% (with default via AMPscript) |
{{ last_name }} | %%LastName%% |
{{ email }} | %%emailaddr%% |
| Unsubscribe link | %%unsub_center_url%% |
| View online | %%view_email_url%% |
Set the default at the top of the email body:
html%%[ var @first set @first = AttributeValue("FirstName") if Empty(@first) then set @first = "there" endif ]%% <p>Hi %%=v(@first)=%%,</p>
Image hosting and the CDN URL pattern
Content Builder uploads images to Marketing Cloud's CDN at upload time. The URL pattern looks like https://image.s10.exct.net/lib/.../yourimage.jpg. If you used external image URLs in Draftship, SFMC will not auto-mirror them. Either upload images to Content Builder's library before pasting, or accept that recipients with image-blocking will see your alt text only.
Sender profile, delivery profile, send classification
SFMC requires three profile bindings before you can send a marketing email. Each one is set at the Send level, not the email level:
- Sender Profile: from-address, from-name, reply-to. You can override per-send.
- Delivery Profile: which IP pool, which header settings. Most teams use the default.
- Send Classification: Commercial vs Transactional. Determines whether the unsubscribe footer is required and which CAN-SPAM rules apply.
Mismarking a commercial email as transactional to skip the unsubscribe footer is a CAN-SPAM violation. Don't.
Test send checklist
- Use Test Send with Render Test enabled to catch AMPscript errors before live send.
- Run Email size checker on the rendered output to catch Gmail's 102 KB clip threshold.
- Click every link from the test email; SFMC's link wrapping for tracking can mangle malformed hrefs.
- Verify the unsubscribe link resolves to your subscriber preference center, not a 404.
When to use SFMC's drag-drop instead
If your team uses Content Builder's drag-drop heavily and treats your Draftship work as a one-off, accept the rendering tradeoffs and rebuild the structure in their builder. If you ship the email once and care about Outlook fidelity, the code view path here is the right call.
For technical context on AMPscript and tokens generally, see Email merge tag fallbacks.