by Dorottya Dvorak 
We regularly mention that personalisation is the key to a successful marketing strategy. Pardot offers multiple tools for personalisation, one of them being variable tags. They display specific, known information about your prospects, and can be quite powerful if you know how to use them.
Where can you use personalisation?
You can include personalisation in both the subject line or the body of your Pardot emails. A common use case is to embed the First Name field, which can easily make a greeting unique to your prospects.
Open your email template or list email draft, go to the Content Editor and select the variable tag icon. Pardot will list all the default and custom fields you can embed in your email.
Watch out! If you want to use a checkbox field, take a look at Sophie’s article first, as it can cause you a few surprises.
What can go wrong?
Personalisation can only work in your favour if you store your customer’s data in the correct format in Pardot.
Think about it, if the First Name field has a blank value, all capitals or lower cases, your email will not look professional at all.
As the first step, make sure your sales team is aware of the importance of providing the values in Salesforce in a way that it can be sent to your prospects, or enforce validation rules to maintain your data integrity.
However, there might be some prospects who submit their details in lowercase and cause the issue themselves. What can we do in that case?
Prevent the issue via form submissions
We have found a solution that helps prospects submit their details in the right format, by correcting lowercase submissions to capitalised entries.
Take a look at the video below to see how it works:
We support our customers with out of the box solutions to expand Pardot’s available toolkit – like this feature! If you would like our support with your Pardot projects, get in touch!
Introducing HML in Pardot
As of August this year a new personalisation tool is available for Pardot users, called Handlebars Merge Language (HML). HML is the main merge language of Salesforce itself, so it might be time for you to upgrade your game.
Final Step
No matter which personalisation you have in place, remember to still review your lists before sending a personalised email. At that point you can update the values manually, or remove the variable tag until the formatting is fixed.