CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Let me clarify:

I want to send my contacts a bulk email update. Where I have a firstname available, I want to personalise the email with it. When I don't have that information, I want to use a generic salutation (e.g. "Dear Sir / Madam", or just "Hi").

What would be the best way of doing this, if it's possible?

Thanks

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I can see that would work.

In an ideal World it would be great to be able to define a default value.. E.g. "Dear customer". So that you either get "Hi John" if you have a firstname value, but "Dear customer" if not. Is this possible?

But on the broader question of organisations and individuals, what's the best practice? Ideally I'd like to do some kind of smart email-shot, which goes to the primary individual contact for each organisation, or uses the organisations contact details where not prirmary individual contact is available.

I know this is asking for a lot, but is such a thing possible? How do people generally handle this situation?

Thanks