I love the fact that I can set a default value for a personalization token in marketing emails. That way if we're missing a value in a contact record, we don't have to worry about looking like email marketing rookies. But it's frustrating that we can't do the same thing in a sales sequence email.
Why is there the option of setting a default value in one type of outbound email but not the other?
Agreed! It surprised us to find out that the default values that we set for some of the personalization tokens for marketing emails aren't getting captured when we try sending 1:1 sales emails. If we could have it for sales emails that are sent via templates as well, this would be a HUGE help!
I agree with this! It's incredibly time-consuming to go in and manually edit large sequences. I want to keep the contact token because it's much more personable if you know the contact's name. I would love for this to be a future feature!
Was surprised to discover that this was possible in Marketing emails but not in Sequences. Lots of use cases, e.g. email copy might say "We have reps in CityName <fallback to 'your area' if blank>, etc
In an ideal world our data would all be well-maintained and complete, but in practice fields are sometimes blank. I ahve thought of a workaround using extra custom properties and workflows, but that would preclude sales folk from having the agility to do some of this themselves and makes it much more complex.
+1 - this is something Outreach.io can do and very fustrating we can't have token dependeinces. I.e. "Hello ContactFirstName <fallback to 'there' if blank>.
It doesn't make sense to have sequence enrollment automation features (workflow action) without the option to use a personalization token in the same time... It's like gaining automation, but losing personalization in the same time, just because you cannot use a basic first name token in sequences... It's the same thing with the 50 contacts bulk enrollment in sequences, which I understand as we don't want to spam people with email sequences... but in workflows contacts need to meet certain criteria to be enrolled into sequence and this is usually happening in a more drip-like cadence.
A workaround for anyone struggling with this - you could create a workflow that looks to see if the property that is being used for the personalization token is empty and, if so, updates the value to whatever you want the default value to be.
If you're worried about having the default value in the property you could create a separate property that is only used for the personalization token and create a workflow that looks at the original property and:
If contains a value --> Copy to this personalization token property
If blank --> Add the default value to this personalization token property
This is not a great solution, because often the field we need is Contact name. If I set a default value of "there" or "friend", the email address will show up in their inbox as having been sent to "there" or "friend".
This is a really basic feature in every other email sequencing tool I've used, I'm not sure why Hubspot does not support it.
Yeah this seems like a super basic function that needs to be available in sales emails in Sequences. I just told my client it was possible, because I could not imaging that it would NOT be possible in HubSpot 😓☹️
