"Dear So-and-so" : getting your email salutation correct

Jennifer Reager

In the 20 years that we've had RE, the practice has been to not create separate records for spouses or use Head of Household processing (unless they both have, say, Volunteer hours to record). This has worked fine, until now. I'm realizing that when we send messages via OLX, the salutation may not match up with the email address. Like, we may have husband's email as primary address, but wife as primary on the account. Or whatever.


Any thoughts about how to clean this up, short of breaking up every single account with email addresses?? Also, how would we know whose address is whose? Is there a merge field in OLX that might solve this? Eeek!

Jen Claudy

This is why we aren't using salutations in OLX messages except for small lists.  I created an Additional Addressee/Salutation (actually two, because it's easier to do both now rather than go back later: OLX Addressee and OLX Salutation).  I then set OLX to use those, and for our lists where we need to use a salutation, we review the list and adjust those fields as needed.  This way, if it's the HOH, it stays as the default, if the email is for the spouse, the salutations can be adjusted to just the spouse's name, and if it's a household email, we can adjust to address both of them.  There are some cases where it's difficult to tell who owns the email address...and there are cases where the record has multiple addresses, one for each.  In those cases, I would create a separate record for the spouse and move the data as necessary.


The thing is, while I think you can use a Spouse Field in OLX, OLX can't tell when to address the HOH and when to address the Spouse based on the email address.  And I don't know that OLX does conditional merges, so if you were to add a Phone Comment or change the Phone Type, I don't think OLX can choose based on that, either.  Although, that would probably be a good one for the OLX Idea Bank.

Karen Stuhlfeier

We too create specific addressee and salutation lines for OLX. We also create separate records for spouses. That makes the most sense to me and has always worked well for us. They have separate email addresses and both like to receive our emails. 


Jen Claudy:

This is why we aren't using salutations in OLX messages except for small lists.  I created an Additional Addressee/Salutation (actually two, because it's easier to do both now rather than go back later: OLX Addressee and OLX Salutation).  I then set OLX to use those, and for our lists where we need to use a salutation, we review the list and adjust those fields as needed.  This way, if it's the HOH, it stays as the default, if the email is for the spouse, the salutations can be adjusted to just the spouse's name, and if it's a household email, we can adjust to address both of them.  There are some cases where it's difficult to tell who owns the email address...and there are cases where the record has multiple addresses, one for each.  In those cases, I would create a separate record for the spouse and move the data as necessary.


The thing is, while I think you can use a Spouse Field in OLX, OLX can't tell when to address the HOH and when to address the Spouse based on the email address.  And I don't know that OLX does conditional merges, so if you were to add a Phone Comment or change the Phone Type, I don't think OLX can choose based on that, either.  Although, that would probably be a good one for the OLX Idea Bank.

 

Sunshine Reinken Watson

We don't put names in emails because the margin for error is just too big!

Dan Junkins

Jennifer Reager:

In the 20 years that we've had RE, the practice has been to not create separate records for spouses or use Head of Household processing (unless they both have, say, Volunteer hours to record). This has worked fine, until now. I'm realizing that when we send messages via OLX, the salutation may not match up with the email address. Like, we may have husband's email as primary address, but wife as primary on the account. Or whatever.


Any thoughts about how to clean this up, short of breaking up every single account with email addresses?? Also, how would we know whose address is whose? Is there a merge field in OLX that might solve this? Eeek!

Struggling with this too.  Right now we have Spouse1, Spouse2 email types on all of our one-record parents.  OLX sends to both parent emails and we address them with our standard letter salutation which, is both, a joint salutation, and formal or informal depending upon who they are.  Parents each get an email that says, Sue and Bob, for example.