First Name Personalization Token

[Joe_J]

I'm new to HubSpot and trying to work out how best to use the first name/salutation personalisation.

Rather than just using the generic and old fashioned "Hi name" at the beginning of an email, we like to incorporate the first name within the copy, "name, check out this great offer".

What I am struggling with, is the fallback if they don't have a name in their record. We don't want to use 'customer' or other inpersonal fallback, ideally we would want it just to make no reference to personalisation at all.

First Name:

"name, check out this great offer"

No First Name:
"Check out this great offer"

What is the best solution, that is also scalable, as we serve content in 8 different languages?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @Joe_J,

If you want a solution that scales well across languages, I'd recommend the following process:

• Create a salutation property for each language, consider differentiating between forman and informal properties
• Create a workflow that re-enrolls records when their first name, last name or gender either becomes known or changes and then sets these values, depending on whether any of the building blocks of the salutation is known or unknown
• The workflow should have three big areas, male, female, unknown / non-binary

A "male" branch could look like this:

This is some work upfront, yes, but allows you to use a specific salutation personalization in each language, always being on the safe side that it accounts for missing values.

If you simply want to use the existing placeholder feature, you'll have to find a neutral placeholder for each language, e.g. "Hello [firstname]" with placeholder "there", resulting in "Hello there" for unknown first names.

I like the workflow solution as it means that I simply need to tell regional teams to pay attention to two properties: full formal salutation and full informal salutation – they don't need to consider missing values, placeholders, smart rules or anything along the lines. Just two personalization tokens out of which they can choose one.

Best regards!

[Joe_J]

Hi @karstenkoehler,

Thanks for your help on this and your time to suggest a solution.

Your suggestion would work if we started every email with "Hi Karsten," and the salution property was its own seperate peice of text, but that isn't how we always use personalisation.

We sometimes want to incorporate it within some text; "Karsten, check out this great offer", in this instance, if there isn't a name, we would need to have no personalisation and the 'C' from 'Check' would need to be capitilised. 

Thanks

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

@Joe_J in that case you would have to use smart rules to display one version of the text without personalisation tokens. There isn't any feature in HubSpot that would correctly display a value or lack there of with correct capitalisation and punctuation outside of the token. This not possible. Any potential workarounds don't scale. The amount of maintenance required would exceed using smart rules.