Using personalization when contact gone or deceased

[JDoty]

Hello,

My team is hesitant to use personalization tokens with first name because they've had people reply to emails in the past saying things like "You've got the wrong person", "They don't work here anymore", ect.

Our current customers have staff changes from time-to-time, and many have staff with shared email addresses, so the email might name "Jim" even though "Jenny" is the first person to read it. It's especially awkward when the support team puts "gone" or "deceased" in the first name field within our CRM (Salesforce), and the contact imports into Hubspot (it doesn't happen terribly often, but we've seen a few contacts with names like that".

Any ideas on how to overcome issues like this so we can personalize emails? Or would you go ahead and use personalization tokens even though the email might not go to the named person?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @JDoty,

If you now that your contacts are using shared email addresses, I'd stay away from personalization tokens, unfortunately. The data available for personalization is not reliable – and potentially negatively affects the buyer's journey.

The second point that you're mentioning ("gone", "deceased") is more of a training/awareness problem. Your team should rather update the Lead status, Lifecycle stage and add/pin a note to the top of a record. This information should not be stored in the First name or Last name field. (You create a filtered view of contacts with first or last name equal to "gone" or "deceased" and point this out to the contact owners.)

I'd keep an eye on the data quality over time. If at some point overall quality seems to have improved, you can start using personalization tokens. (It will always be a trade-off. Automation is never perfect, always an approximation.)

Best regards!

[JDoty]

Hello Karsten,

This is excellent insight on the potential impact fot the buyer's journey based on these factors. I appreciate the advice about data quality as well. Thank you!