Why Are Your Email Placeholders Showing Fallback Text Instead of Contact Data?

Last updated: April 13, 2026

When sending personalized email campaigns, placeholders are used to automatically insert contact-specific details (like a company name or first name) into your messages. If those placeholders aren't pulling in the right data, it usually comes down to a naming mismatch between your placeholder and your contact list.

Why does this happen?

Each placeholder you use — for example, {custom_company_name:{company_name:your company}} — works by searching your contact data for a field with that exact name.

Here's the order it follows:

  1. It first looks for custom_company_name

  2. If that's not found, it looks for company_name

  3. If neither exists, it falls back to the default value — in this case, "your company"

So if you're seeing fallback text in your sent emails, it means none of the field names in your placeholder matched a column in your contact list.

How to fix it

You have two options:

  1. Update your placeholder: Change the placeholder to match the exact column name in your CSV. For example, if your CSV has a column called Company Name - Cleaned, update your placeholder to: {Company Name - Cleaned}

  2. Rename your CSV column: Rename the column in your CSV to match your existing placeholder. For instance, rename Company Name - Cleaned to company_name, and your placeholder {company_name} will work as expected.

For the smoothest experience, we recommend using the platform's built-in default placeholders wherever possible. These are pre-configured to map reliably to standard contact fields, reducing the chance of mismatches.

⚠ Important: Placeholder names are case-sensitive and must match your CSV column headers exactly — including spaces, capitalization, and any special characters.