Marketo Name Tokens

[Anonymous]

When we add a first name token in our emails, Marketo goes by the way the lead name exists in the database. The challenge is while importing data from lists (internal and external) a lot of times the names are all captilized and that's how they get fed into Marketo, unless manually changed to proper case. This results in an email addressing the name in all caps (bad user experience). My question is, instead of having to manually change names to their proper case each time during data uploads, is there a custom robust way Marketo can identify if the name in the database exists in all caps and make sure to change that to proper case in the email token or am I asking for too much? 🙂

[SanfordWhiteman]

"Proper case" for last names is not something you actually know.  I've mentioned this in a number of posts on the topic. Some cultures take their nobiliary particles very seriously. In trying to fix up names, you may outright insult the lead, which is certainly worse than the disease (which is, in fact, error-free) of all caps.

If you still want to make these haphazard guesses, you can use Marketo's Email Scripting to capitalize (search the docs).  But I would recommend that any automated attempt to clean such lists be done by a company that has experience in such matters, so their algorithm knows that VON HUMBOLDT is more likely "von Humboldt" than "Von Humboldt."