Email salutation tricky without if/then option

[DMurphy1]

I am setting up a email nurture campaign and would like to include personalization in the salutation. Our audience is predominantly law enforcement so rank is normally used (Officer Smith, Chief Jones). 

But sometimes there isn;t a rank so the email would go out looking like this:

Dear Murphy,

or even worse:

Dear --none--Murphy

I'd like to be able to say if rank is null, leave blank and leave last name blank:

Hello Officer Smith,

Hello Chief Jones,

when no rank is given:

Hello,  ( Donna Murphy)

For now I have to not include personalization and that looks very impersonal. 

Any ideas?

[Phil_Vallender]

Hi @DMurphy1

That is a tricky one. I imagine that personalisation rules are more complicated than most people need, but that doens't help you. 

My only thoughts right now are either to ask people to submit their rank and name as one property (not great), or you might be able to pass the salutation and name fields out to zapier, concatenate them their and the pass them back into a single new property for use in emails. 

I hope this gives you some ideas. 

[DMurphy1]

Might work but seems like it would be hard to keep up with since leads continually come in and enter the workflow. I think for now I skip the personalisation.  Not ideal but can't figure out a way around it. Thanks for the advice though!

[Phil_Vallender · Accepted solution]

Hi @DMurphy1

I agree that it might be too tricky to make sense, but if trying the zapier route, you can always delay a workflow starting by adding an 'is known' condition for the property that zapier will populate. 

Best of luck.

[DMurphy1]

@Phil_Vallender I can test that out. Thanks again for the input. I'm just a little disappointed at how many times we have to find a workaround or hack to get the system to work for us. I love Hubspot. I really believe it is a powerful tool and for the most part I'm impressed with what it can do. But there are times I'm baffled by the inability to customize.