Address journalists properly in different languages

What it means for customers

A new `journalist.salutation` merge tag is now available in your templates. Drop it in where you would normally write your opening greeting and it generates a correct, language-appropriate salutation for each journalist automatically - no need to add 'Hi' or any other opener yourself, as the full salutation is already included in the tag output. For English-language contacts it pre-fills as 'Hi [preferred first name]'. For languages where that structure does not work, it generates the right formal or informal salutation instead.

Why we built it

We built this because applying an English-style salutation across all languages causes real problems. In many languages the journalist's name changes grammatically depending on context, and in some - Czech, for example - a generic salutation simply cannot be constructed at all; it must be set on a per-journalist basis. Applying a one-size-fits-all approach in those markets risks your emails reading as unnatural or incorrect, which affects open and response rates. Multi-region teams raised this as a recurring blocker, and this tag removes it.

Use cases

• A PR team running outreach in Czech, where a generic salutation is grammatically impossible, can use the tag to ensure each journalist receives a salutation that has been set individually rather than generated from a broken formula.
• Teams sending outreach in German, where a formal salutation requires knowing the journalist's gender, get an informal salutation pre-filled automatically - keeping emails polite and natural without manual intervention.
• Outreach in Slavic languages, where the journalist's name cannot be used directly in the salutation, now receives an appropriate generic formal salutation inserted by the tag.
• Multi-region in-house communications teams running a single campaign across several countries can use one template with this tag and have each journalist receive a salutation that suits their language and convention.

Why it matters

Salutation errors are one of the most immediate signals to a journalist that an email was not written with them in mind. Getting this right - especially in markets with strict grammatical or cultural conventions - is a straightforward way to improve the credibility of your outreach and protect your sender reputation across every region you operate in.