What is a custom field?

All of your subscriber lists will have 2 default fields; "Name" and "Email address". Any additional fields (up to the maximum of 20) in your subscriber list are called custom fields.

Custom fields can be used to store additional contact information such as a subscriber's address, city, country, phone number or other relevant data such as interests, birthdays or answers to a survey.

Creating custom fields

To manually create custom fields, just navigate to your subscriber list, then click on the "Custom fields" link in the right column. Here you can add new custom fields one at a time, giving each field a name and data type. You can also choose whether to have the field visible to recipients when they edit their settings in the preference center.

Tip You can also import multiple value custom fields when adding new subscribers to a list via importing a file.

Using custom fields

On your custom fields page, you will see that each custom field has a personalization tag that you can use to personalize the campaign. You may like to personally greet the recipient by their name or populate parts of the email with data relevant for the subscriber. Please note that each custom field value has a data limit of 250 characters.

You can also use the information in your custom fields to create segments in your subscriber list that you can send targeted campaigns to. This may include all subscribers who live in Canada, have a birthday in August or those who like dogs as pets.

Viewing and editing custom field data

When you are viewing your subscriber lists, only the email and name fields will show up in list view. To see the custom field values for any specific email address, just click on that address to view the subscriber snapshot.

You can see each field there, and you can also easily edit the values. When you export your list, you can choose to export any or all of the custom field values for each subscriber too.

How many custom fields can I use?

Each list can have a maximum of 20 fields, in addition to the default name and email fields that every list has. It is not possible to add more than 20 fields at this time.

Can I delete a custom field?

You sure can. When you are looking at the list of custom fields for your specific subscriber list, just hover over the one you want to remove. Over on the right a trash can icon will display. Click that to remove the field. Please be aware that will also delete any data already stored in that field for all your subscribers.

You will be given a warning, but still - be careful! 

Can I show these fields on my subscribe forms?

Now that you've defined the custom fields, you might want to collect data for those fields on your subscribe form. Just click the 'Create a subscribe form' link for your list, and you'll be able to select the new fields you want to collect, and then regenerate the HTML code to paste on your site.