In FreshMail, custom fields allow you to enter additional information about your recipients so you can send more appropriately tailored communications. This means that you can send personalized messages based upon, for example, a recipient’s name, city of residence, or most recent purchase.

FreshMail allows you to create any number of custom fields in each list of subscribers. Custom fields can be in text form (e.g.: name, city) or numerical form (e.g. date of birth, date of subscription), which is appropriate when creating subscriber segments using the command ‘greater/less than’. FreshMail lets you use up to 255 characters in either field.

Why you should use custom fields

Custom fields help your campaign in two ways.

The first benefit is the ability to personalize your message. Think about how likely you are to be interested in a mail addressed to 'Ladies and Gentlemen' or to no one in particular as opposed to a message addressed to you by name. FreshMail puts this power to customize your communications in your hands.

Custom fields also help you by allowing you to target your campaigns to specific segments of your contact list. For example you might have a message that you only want to send to women. Or perhaps you only want to send a campaign to people in a certain age group or in a particular geographical area. Or maybe your message is very specific and you only want to send it to women of a certain age in a certain geographical area. You can do all of these things in FreshMail.

Just set the parameters according to your wishes and it's done. The only limitation is the amount of data in your contact list.

Adding a custom field

Click on ‘Contact lists’, choose the list that you want to add a custom field to, and then select the ‘Custom Fields’ option from the menu on the left.

The first custom field you will always see is the email addresses that have already been added to the contact list.

 

Clicking on 'Add field' will create a new line where you can give the custom field a name and select 'text' or 'number' depending on what kind of data the custom field is based on.

Be sure to click 'Save' when you are done and start thinking about how you can use your new custom field to make your next campaign more successful!