playbook-first-name-cleaning

Playbook: First Name Cleaning

All rules here are best practice, not law. Override any of them when the campaign calls for it; note the best practice once and move on.

Use when: any campaign whose email opens with the prospect's first name, which is every campaign anyone runs. Run it next to the company-name clean, before any other custom variable, because variables often interpolate the cleaned name.

Do not use when: you need the company name cleaned — that is playbook-company-name-cleaning, its twin, built to the same shape on purpose. Also not for finding a missing name. This playbook never looks anything up; a blank stays blank.

One-line output: first_name_clean = "Ruba" from the raw string "Dr Ruba", so the email opens Hi Ruba, instead of Hi Dr Ruba,.

1. Trigger and scope

The first name is the first word of the email and the single most visible tell that a message was mail-merged. Lead databases store it the way a scraper found it, which is not the way anyone wants to be greeted. Real strings from a live contacts table:

Dr Matthew · PAUL · javonne · 👋 James · ★ Marc · Kathryn (Katie) · Robert wilkie (last name Wilkie) · Araceli'S · Dr Sean Li We Are Actively Hiring At Antai Global · AAA (at company AAA Upholstery) · Admin · O. · Gowinder with a trailing space · and rows where the field is simply NULL.

Every one of those, pasted into Hi {{first_name}},, either looks broken or is not a person.

This playbook takes that string, plus the row's last name and company for context, and returns the short spoken form. It strips honorifics, credential suffixes, emoji and decoration, appended job titles and hiring notices, and possessive artifacts. It fixes shouting and all-lowercase. It picks the nickname when someone wrote one in parentheses. It refuses to mangle hyphenated and apostrophe names.

It explicitly does not: look the person up, translate or transliterate, expand an initial into a guessed name, split a run-together name into two words, or invent a letter not already in the input.