Hi @AngeloITA,

Thanks for sharing this question with us.

“Friend” will only appear in the absence of the “first_name” field. As long as a value for that field exists (in your case, the value being “Newsletter Subscriber”), we will populate that value as the first name using that tag.

Instead, I recommend exporting these users’ names from Mailchimp (include the First Name, Last Name and email address fields in the export) and re-import them into Klaviyo. You can upload them into a new list or to an existing one. As long as the email addresses in Klaviyo matches what you have in Mailchimp, we will not create duplicate profiles for these users but both first and last name will be updated in Klaviyo.

I hope that’s helpful :) 

Hi, thanks for the reply, but if the name field is not populated it is because in mailchimp it is not present.
Is there a way to massively change the name field on contacts?

Hi @AngeloITA,

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, using the method I described above you can mass update the first and last name for as many contacts as you wish. If you don’t have their first and last names stored anywhere else aside from Mailchimp, another solution is to update the first name field to ‘there’ or ‘friend’ (done by adding the “First Name” field to your .csv and updating all the columms to ‘there’ or ‘friend’ along with their email addresses) and then re-uploading that .csv to Klaviyo. That way, the same tag: {{ first_name|default:'friend' }}. will populate ‘there’ or ‘friend’ in the first name field.

From there, you can use a manage preferences page to collect existing users’ actual first and last names. Once this is done, the tag will automatically display their real first name in your emails instead of ‘there’ or ‘friend’ as these users update their actual names using the manage preferences page. You can check out the About Preferences Pages section in the Guide to Understanding Opt-in Related Pages for a List for more information on manage preferences pages.

I hope that’s helpful and thanks for being a member of our community.