Custom fields allow users to collect and store any type of information from their contacts. A custom field gives all contacts in a user’s account a category to store custom information. Customers use custom fields to add contact-specific details to an email and when importing a file of contacts. The custom fields can then be used to insert additional personalized content in email campaign. We provide a use case in the next section of this page.
In the API, a custom_field
is a contact object subresource used to store a category of data for each contact. A custom_field
subresource has three components:
- a label or name of the
custom_field
(category name) - the type of data in the category (string or date)
- the contact-specific
custom_field
value
A user has to first create the custom_field
subresource, and then they can apply contact-specific custom field data to contacts in their account.
Example Use Case
Acme Auto Repair wants include customer-specific vehicle information in email campaigns they send out to their lists. The categories of information they need to store are:
- Vehicle Make
- Vehicle Model
- Vehicle Year
The contact resource does not have any properties that can be used to store this information. The solution is to create custom_field
subresources to store these categories of information in a contact resource. Acme Auto Repair creates four custom fields to meet their needs:
- Vehicle1 Make and Model
- Vehicle1 Year
- Vehicle2 Make and Model
- Vehicle2 Year
A large number of customers have more than one vehicle, so Acme Auto Repair created 2 sets of custom fields. The shop can now personalize content in their email campaigns using these custom fields to insert customer-specific vehicle information into their email campaigns.
Learn more about adding custom content to email campaigns here.
Limits
The custom_field
subresource has the following limits:
Maximum number of custom fields in a user’s account | 100 |
Maximum number of custom fields per contact | 50 |
Maximum characters in a custom_field name | 50 |
Work Flow for Creating and Applying Custom Fields
Here is a basic work flow to follow when creating and managing custom fields, and then applying them to contact resources.
Determine the information categories you need to store for contacts that are not already part of the contact resource.
Step 1 GET all existingcustom_fields
to verify whether any of the proposed `custom_field` categories already exist. If you need additional custom fields, proceed to Step 2.Step 2 Create a new
custom_field
for each information category.Step 3 Include
custom_field
data when adding new contacts.Step 4 Update existing contacts with
custom_field
data.