Why is my contact's salutation / gender wrong?

If Effixient has mistakenly referred to a contact with the wrong salutation (Herr / Frau), we completely understand this can be an uncomfortable situation.

Why does this happen?

Effixient can often, but not always retrieve a contact's gender from their XING profile.

For a large number of profiles, XING does not provide this information to our scraper, and we have to infer which salutation to use based on the contact's first name.

This is mostly accurate, however, there are names which are ambiguous and therefore we cannot guarantee 100% accuracy in the salutation used. We use a third party data provider called Genderize to give us this information.

This is unfortunately not something within our control and something we have done our best to minimise the occurrences of. Nevertheless, it can happen for a very small percentage of profiles.

How can I stop this from happening?

If you are sending out messages at scale, it's generally possible to tolerate some false-positives without affecting the overall campaign performance. Whilst there may be one or two uncomfortable responses, when sending to thousands of profiles this should not hugely impact the end result of the campaign.

If you are running a more niche campaign and determine that false positives not tolerable, and you require 100% accuracy on the salutation, the options are as follows:

1. Checking the list of contacts manually before sending
2. Not using the {{titleAndLastNameDE}} or {{sehrGeehrte}} merge fields in your message, and instead using {{firstName}} .

How can I respond to angry replies?

If you've received an angry reply from someone because of addressing them with the wrong salutation, here are some options you can use for how to respond.

These are of course only suggestions - use what you think will be best with your prospects.

In every case, try to steer the conversation back to being about the opportunity presented to them - if the opportunity is good/a fit for them and they're interested, it's still a lead worth pursuing.

I'm very sorry Herr/Frau <last name> - after reviewing your profile I asked our intern to reach out to you and they have clearly made a mistake here.

Did you manage to look at the <opportunity> we sent over? I think it could be great for you given <unique fact about them that makes them suited to the opportunity>