Email Personalisation - Bad Data

[Colin_Ryder]

Hi guys

Like a lot of you we use the standard lead.first name token for email personalisation in either the body (common) or sometimes in the subject line.

Example; Dear {{lead.First Name:default=Sir/Madam}}

For small blasts this is fine because we can check the data prior and make sure it's one or the other but what do recommend to use/fix when you have bad data such as someone's first name being one character or common rubbish such as "Test" or other examples

ie. T Smith. > this would show as "Dear T"

or

Test Test > this would show as "Dear Test"

I'm pretty sure there were some great recommendations on here but I couldn't find them when I did a search.

I know we can use Email Scripting (not using it yet ) for fixing issues with capitals etc. I wonder if we could use something like that for this as well.

Any suggestions, most welcome

Thanks

Colin

ps - I did think we could suspend anyone with "Test" or something so they wouldn't receive emails - thoughts on this - and is there a common list someone could share

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Colin,

Velocity is great to fix format issues or generate the final output, but is not really recommended for fixing bad data.

I recommend rather to use a proxy field and run some smart campaigns to fill that field in.

• If the first name is in a list of known / correct ones (you can update it on a regular basis) -> proxy field = first name. Else Proxy field = "friend".

Then you can use the velocity to fix Uppercase and other formatting issues.

Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

List of allowed first names? Is this one of those French things again?

Anyway, one-letter first names or last names don't represent junk data. They're used professionally by tens of millions of people in India (and beyond). (By "professionally" I mean they aren't using shorthand on a form, that's the way their name is written in most other contexts, too.)

One-letter first and last names is probably not culturally linked. But they still may be the person's actual initials, so I don't know why you'd "fix it up." I can see omitting one-letter names using Velocity because they look iffy in some layouts, but treating them as bad data seems even stranger to me!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I meant list of recognised first names, not allowed ones

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yeah, but what's the difference?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I prefer to send a "Dear Friend" to quite a few people than taking the risk of send someone a "Dear Qwerty" because that person even forgot they had provided this first name 8 months ago on my web site. I latin culture, people prefer that someone be a litlle distant than making a big mistake on their first name, even if THEY provided that mistaken name in the first place.

And also because we have the problem of ladies and gents. "Dear" in english becomes "Chère" for ladies and "Cher" for gentlemen in French. And this is the same in Spanish, Italian, ...

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

We had that conversation already, I remember

[SanfordWhiteman]

So you mean a blacklist of disallowed names, not a whitelist of allowed names. That makes more sense. The way you phrased it was "if in list, then use the name they entered" -- thus a whitelist.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Yes, exactly.

-Greg

[Nicholas_Manojl]

Another common example is "M." for people with the first name Mohammed.