If you market in an industry whose target audience prefers to be addressed more formally (such as lawyers, academics, physicians, medical directors, etc.), you should find this tip useful
In your industry, you ideally want to address your high-value audience by their professional titles, especially if you market to healthcare and academic audiences. Salutations such as "Dear Dr. Romanoff" or "Dear Prof. Xavier" communicate greater respect and professionalism than "Dear Natasha" or "Dear Charles" would, and your audience cares about this nuance.
The challenge, however, is that your marketing automation and CRM data is not structured to easily identify whether you have the profile data necessary to confidently address an email as "Dear {{lead.salutation}} {{lead.last name}}," as most of our CRM systems a.) Do not require a salutation and b.) Not all of the salutation values in your database should be used to personalize an email. This presents a challenge as an incorrectly formatted formal greeting (such as "Dear MrDr. Smith") would do more harm than simply addressing the email "Dear Bob."
There are means to use scripting logic to code this logic into your emails. However, there is a code-free way to enable your marketing automation tool to decipher your lead's data profile to use a formal greeting when your data profile is complete, or use the lead's first name when your data is incomplete.
Setting up a formal greeting token in Marketo
- In the Admin module, navigate to Field Management
- Create a custom field, named "Formal Greeting. Set the field type as "Formula"
- Under rules, click the link to "Edit Rules"
- Within the Computation options, create an option to evaluate the salutation field for your formalized greeting. Create the condition "If Salutation is...," then click the green "plus" button and paste your list of valid salutation titles into the list of values. Then, click ok to add your list to this condition's filter
- In the value box for your valid salutation condition, set the value to equal {{lead.salutation}} {{lead.last name}}.
- In the value box for the default choice, set the value equal to {{lead.first name}}
- Click "Save" to create your new formula field. This field will be referenced as a lead token in Marketo labeled {{lead.formal greeting}}
- When you create a personalized email and want to address a lead formally, use {{lead.formal greeting}} to address your recipient versus {{lead.first name}}
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