“my name is not john”, or how to solve an email personalisation problem

image source: designmomaacquisitions

We get hundreds of email replies to our newsletter. The great majority of them are automated out-of-office replies, but we also get unsubscribe emails, address change emails, information request emails. And, emails that criticise us for our bad grammar.

Well:

a) we check our emails for spelling and grammar to death (and I will be the first to say that I can be pedantic about such things, and would rather die before sending out an email with typos), and

b) like most companies who employ email personalisation, we can only go on what the user gives us. It’s the old “garbage in, garbage out” idea.

There was an email from someone saying that their name was not “john, but “John”. I say: “that’s fine, but you gave us john” – our records show that the name that was given at signup was “john”. Unfortunately, we cannot always depend on users to give us grammatically correct first names. Luckily, if you can get to the code, there is a quickfire solution.

The way to go is to use a bit of inline CSS and, more specifically, by using text-transform. The value to assign to that property is capitalize:

Welcome <b style=”text-transform:capitalize;”>[first name]</b>!

(By the way, we add the style inside the <b> tag: generally unorthodox, but we ourselves want the first name to be bolded, plus it works and is valid under the HTML 4.01 doctype. And remember to add a fallback!)

This handy snippet changes the initial letter of a string – in this case, the first name – to an uppercase one. Therefore, “john” changes to “John”. If it were uppercase already, then it will remain unchanged, so those who entered “John” will be fine. All other characters remain unchanged too, so if the first name was originally JOHN or jOHN, then the CSS would turn it into JOHN or JOHN – both of which are better than “john”. I’ve tested it, and have so far seen it to work in the BFWC*, Thunderbird, but not Outlook 2007 (despite what Campaign Monitor say). It’s therefore not 100% effective, but at least it will work for the majority of subscribers. Again, the caveat is that you can get to the code to make the edit. If not, get someone who has access to do it for you!

You could also somehow update the records in your database via some backend function, but this is harder to do. There are a number of email delivery systems that can do it on the fly during sending. I cannot vouch for your own system, and whether it can do said update automatically, so you’ll have to see for yourself. Either way, it may probably involving tweaking some settings: when system changes are involved, things can become a little bit scary. Plus, you might not have access to do such things.

It’s always important to bear in mind that a user’s impression of your brand can be made up by whether you get things right or not, especially when personal information is concerned. We cannot tell the subscriber that they’ve submitted their first name gramatically incorrectly either: some people couldn’t care less, and their reaction might be less than savoury. But by getting things correct anyway, their first impression of you will be positive. Remain grammatically incorrect and your subscriber might think less of you, even if it wasn’t your fault in the first place.

And what worser place to be grammatically incorrect than the first name.

* the BFWC = Big Four Webmail Clients. Or, specifically, GMail, Windows Live/Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo! Mail. I’ll be using this acronym frequently.