It's no secret that Marketing Cloud Next (MCN) — or "Growth", or "Agentforce Marketing", or whatever they happen to be calling it this month — is the future of Salesforce marketing products. For the first iterations of it, MCN has seemed focused on attracting new customers with smaller email needs, as an on-core, Flow-based email product for people already in the Salesforce ecosystem.
For existing users for Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE... or traditionally, SFMC... or to the old schoolers like me who used it pre-Salesforce, ex-ExactTarget), and particularly for enterprise users, there have been some deal breakers with missing functionalities. Among those, a lack of AMPscript support has been #1.
If you use AMPscript, you know it's infinitely more powerful than any drag-and-drop decision split block will ever be. It allows you to not just personalize an email with tokens/fields in your sending data, but to look up data from other tables, transform how it displays, and create data-driven dynamic versioning of your email. The idea of moving to a new MC that doesn't support AMPscript sounds like giving up one of the most powerful tools in your kit.
But not for much longer.
It's Here(-ish)
In Salesforce's Summer 2026 Release Overview, AMPscript is called out as coming to MCN in PDF 1, pages 353-355. And they acknowledge that this is a big deal for current MCE customers that want to continue using their historical code skills for great personalized emails.
It does say the support will have a "targeted set of functions" which implies that not 100% of functions will be available immediately. AMPscript is a deep language and there are a lot of functions that probably needed dev work to migrate from MCE mechanics to MCN mechanics (for example, I'm sure data extensions are very different on the back end). I'd also guess that system strings might end up a little different from one system to another. So I wouldn't expect a 100% 1:1 recreation.
Either way, this is a huge step forward for MCN and proof that Salesforce is listening to concerns from its existing MCE community. There are a lot of instances in that slide deck where the "Impact" callout mentions "unblocking" MCE customers from migrating to MCN.
Also Of Note
Some other enterprise-level features I saw that caught my interest:
- CC and synthetic CC recipients (pages 376-378): the ability to add internal or partner stakeholders on a send
- This "synthetic" concept is a great idea... imagine a salesperson being included as a reply-only CC on an automated email to a lead... the salesperson doesn't actually receive the email, but does receive any replies from the end customer
- Dynamic from/reply names/addresses (pages 379-380): I have specifically called this one out as a non-negotiable feature for multi-brand enterprise companies, so it's nice to see this getting support
- Translations files (pages 382-383): As someone still managing translated content with AMPscript if/then statements, I'm curious to see this one in action
Salesforce is clearly making MCE customers a priority with the next wave of MCN features, so we have increasingly fewer excuses to bury our heads in the sand. MCN is coming. Will they be ready before we are?
On the bright side... it's nice to know that the "AMPscript Ninja" title won't be obsolete in the MCN future. 😅
What other MCE features are holding you back from MCN?
Top comments (0)