When email personalization goes wrong
Latest posts | Feed | | By Mark Brownlow
You may have heard of the problems with one politician's email messages due to pranksters signing people up without their knowledge.By putting rude words in the sign-up fields for first and last name, the pranksters ensure emails get delivered to unsuspecting victims with the aggressive salutation "Dear (insert your favorite term of abuse)".
Now, presidential hopefuls are more likely to be the target of such pranks than your average email marketer.
But do you have any controls in place to ensure stupid names don't make it into your emails?
It's not just pranksters. The snider variety of real subscriber sometimes uses the sign-up field to send "witty" messages or input words that look funny when the subsequent emails arrive.
Or it might just be obvious typos.
Or people typing anything just to get through the registration process.
A quick run through my own newsletter database turns up such first name gems as:
- bOB
- dAVID (and many others with inappropriate capitalization)
- yyy1216
- aff
- business
Anyone recommend some techniques or tools that might help? And anyone got some lovely first name examples from their own lists for us?
Tags: email marketing, email personalization
Permalink | February 27, 2008 | 10 comment(s) - add yours!
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10 Comments:
Yet another reason to confirm subscribers. Granted, the confirm email might contain an inappropriate name (unless you avoid personalizing the confirm email) but that's just one time.
Inappropriate capitalization is, for the most part, easily fixed upon sending - we and other ESPs offer name variables that will convert bOB, BOB, etc. into Bob.
As far as checking signups vs. a database of inappropriate names, that's doable for ESPs, too. I don't dare repeat the entries we've seen, but you can bet I'd be offended if someone addressed me by them.
By 
Justin Premick, on
27 February, 2008
Hey Mark. That pesky personalization. I don't know if this information will be of any help to those who don't use GroupMail, but maybe the concepts in the tutorial below will help your readers search for available applications for use outside of GroupMail.
We have a Tweaker Add-on for GroupMail that allows for the tweaking of fields associated with recipients (i.e. capitalization, formatting, etc.) You might find it interesting.
How to Use the Tweaker Add-on
All the best
Tom
By Tom O'Leary, on
27 February, 2008
Thanks guys. Glad to see some ESPs / software are on the ball. And I agree that it's another vote in favor of double opt-in (or at least sending a welcome message with a clear unsubscribe link in it.)
By 
Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
27 February, 2008
Half of the personalisation problems can be solved during data capture. Some practices I have developed are:
1. Have a dropdown for the title field with values of Mr., Mrs. Miss, Ms. - these four have 100% of title coverage. Overcomplicating title capture with Doctor, Reverend, etc. entries gives more room for errors and should be used only in a well managed or specialised database that is constantly looked after.
2. Use field validation rules - allow only alpha characters plus several other ones (dash, apostrophe, etc.) in the name fields.
3. Regularly clean name entries using professional software that matches its name tables against entries on your database and corrects missplellings and properly cases them. Manually go through the records that fall out of confidence criteria set during automatic name correction and casing.
4. Create a separate salutation field in some instances if it is logically viable in a given situation.
5. Delete bogus entries from the name fields. It is much better to not have anything in them and use a 'Dear customer' as salutation rather than rely on them and have gems like 'Dear 123'.
6. It doesn't hurt to be overparanoid about name and salutations - these are probably the most personal things in the communication piece and subscribers see them before they even get to the main feature. Get it wrong from the first line - it will most likely go in the bin.
By Alec Saiko, on
28 February, 2008
Thanks for sharing Alec, great stuff.
By Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
28 February, 2008
If you have access to the HTML of your subscription form, then you can add the following CSS property to the text inputs:
text-transform: capitalize;
(W3Schools info on text-transform)
It's not a perfect solution, but it can help if people just type in lower case. For example, using this technique:
'first last' becomes 'First Last'
but:
'fIRST' becomes 'FIRST'
'fiRST' becomes 'FiRST'
So it doesn't really help much in these latter instances unfortunately.
Thanks,
Paul.
By Paul Stone, on
28 February, 2008
Another good tip - thanks Paul
By Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
03 March, 2008
Paul Stone, I must correct you; text-transform: capitalise will always capitalise the words to the format "First Last" - I does not just 'invert' the capitalisation. It is more useful than you think!
By , on
11 March, 2008
Thanks for this article-very useful and informative! But what software or database would you use to clean up your list? Does, say, Aweber offer a tool to aid with that?
Many thanks!
By Alex, on
11 March, 2008
Hi Alex,
At AWeber we check signups against a database of inappropriate entries and expunge those records.
We do not offer automated tools to detect/correct misspellings in the name. Actually, I'm not aware of any ESPs (at least among those serving small & medium-sized businesses - perhaps some of the enterprise-level ones do) that offer such a tool.
By Justin Premick (AWeber.com), on
11 March, 2008
