Dynamic Salutations Using Tokens

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone!

Wondering if it's possible to have a dynamic saultation depending on the time of day by using tokens...?  Example:

If it's morning (before noon) for it to say "Good morning," and if it's after noon to say "Good afternoon,".

What's the verdict on the possibility of doing this?

[Anonymous]

I know real time personalization can definitely do this on landing pages and your website. If you're talking strictly email, once it's in their inbox, I don't believe you could dynamically populate a salutation.

However, you could make a salutation token for the program, and if you have certain ones being batched at a certain time of day, you could drop in that token where necessary? Not sure if that solves what you're looking for though.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Hi Dave,

On landing pages, you can do this with very simple JavaScript. In emails, this is not possible based on when they opened the mail.

Justin

[Robb_Barrett]

Well, you could make three images: one saying Good Morning, one saying Good Afternoon and one saying Good Night.  They all are named "salutation.gif".  Every day at the appropriate time, you write over the current .gif with the appropriate .gif.  When the email opens, it'll pull it over as an image.

It's not a great solution, but let's not say there's no solution.

[Justin_Cooperm2 · Accepted solution]

Robb,

Some email services (ex: Gmail) will pre-download all images ahead of time when the message is received and then handle serving them to the recipient at a later time when the email is actually opened. Since there is no way to know 100% that the recipient is going to see the correct message, we recommend avoiding this practice.

Justin

[Anonymous]

Forgot to put some important information in the question - the emails in question are being sent from Sales Insight.  At this point I'll just clone the current emails and have folders for morning and evening.  

Thanks everyone!