Salutation Basic

Question

How can I personalize the greeting in an email using a contact's first name?

Answer

The most common use of logic in Templates is addressing the message to the contact in the following manner:

Dear [FIRST],

This can be done using the following logic statement:

%%if first != "" then print "Dear\+"%%%%$first%%%%if first != "" then print ","%%

This statement is two logical statements and a simple personalization tag combined.  If the first name is blank, then nothing is printed at all.

The first part of the statement prints "Dear " if the first name field is not empty or blank.  The space after "Dear" is created with the special character combination "\+".

The second part of the statement is the %%$first%% tag, which prints the contents of the contact's first name field if it is not empty.  Logic is not necessary to print a blank, because if the first name is empty, nothing will be printed.

The third portion of the statement then prints a comma if the first name field is not empty or blank.

Alternately, you could use the following statement:

Dear %%if first = "" then print "Friend" else printdata first%%,

This would print "Dear Friend," if the first name field is empty, and print "Dear [FIRST]," if not empty.