Addressing leads by gender in German language emails

[Anonymous]

We want to start emailing leads in local languages and for German the proper way to address leads is by male / female + last name.

Since we dont collect the salutation for leads any tips or tricks on how to address leads by male/female in emails?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Thomas,

Pardon my being a little blunt, but the first thing you need to do when you want to personalize email by gender is to capture the info. You should:

1. Add the gender field to all your forms and make it mandatory. People tend to answer accurately to this question and do not find it too intrusive
2. Process your DB based on first name if you have them and try to initialize the DB as much as you can. Take no risk, so if you have mix first name, leave it empty
3. Create a Marketo formula field for the email salutation. This formula field will use choices
   1. if gender = female, field = "female"+" "+last name
   2. if gender = male, field = "male"+ " "+last name
   3. defaut : the usual defaut for German.
4. Use that new field as a token in your email
5. Test it intensely, using a list in the email preview pane.

-Greg

[Josh_Hill13]

or do what Greg said

[Dan_Stevens_]

Is it still true that formula fields can only be used in trigger campaigns?

Re: Formula Fields in Batch Emails - not allowed?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

AFAIK, yes it is true.

The doc even says:

Create and Use a Concatenated String (Formula) Field - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Greg - the doc doesn't mention anything about not being able to use it in batch email campaigns.  I just learned of that from the prior discussion thread I linked to.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

In this discussion, the question is:

Marketo would not allow to use formula fields as tokes in batch emails, is this true?

and Cheryl answers:

Yes, this is true.  You can use the Formula Field in a Trigger campaign only.

So I am not sure I understand your point.

And BTW I also provided a couple of workarounds.

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

got it - I didn't see your reply to that discussion thread, which was added after I posted a link to that thread here.  Thanks for offering those two suggestions.

Also, that thread was from 2014.  Wasn't sure if anything had changed - thus the reason why I looked in product docs and found nothing that mentioned that.

[Josh_Hill13]

Ask for Salutation when the lead selects Country=Germany,Austria.

You can also create a processor that listens for Germany, empty Salutation (or non German Salutation) - then looks for names or suffix types to attempt to assign by Gender. Not perfect, but it can work.

Or you can export German leads and update by hand.

[Anonymous]

Just one thing to add.

My question would be if you are planning to capture German or English salutations? This would determine the way you communicate with your database e.g. if your communication will still be in English, it's fine to work without salutation.

Nevertheless, working with German salutations as well as communication has huge benefits in the DACH region (be careful with Switzerland though:)) even though your programs can get a little bit complicated.