Custom Contact Fields
There are many times in which it is helpful to store additional information inside the Textel platform on your contacts. These could be fields that help tie contact information together between systems, information that you want to use to personalize or customize your messages, or simply additional details that you want to collect on contacts.
On the Textel platform, we allow you to define up to 5 Contact Custom Fields in your account. These fields are specific to your account and will be applied to contacts, allowing you to set values for the fields for each contact.
Custom Contact Field Setup
Admins can go to the Manage Account page using the navigation in the top right menu. Once on the Manage Account page, there will be a section labeled "Contact Custom Fields".
In this section you can define and name up to 5 fields to use on your contacts. You can update the names of these fields once they have been created.
Applying Custom Fields to Contacts
There are two primary ways in which you can add custom fields to contacts once they have been defined at the account level.
- Add values to contacts individually when creating a new contact or updating one in the platform.
- In bulk, via the contact import. You can import a CSV file with the contact data and map the data columns in the import. The new fields will show up as optional columns for you to map as part of your import.
NOTE: The custom fields are available as part of the Contact Export as well. This allows you to pull down the data in bulk as well.
Using the Custom Fields
As noted above, the Contact Custom Fields can be used for a variety of purposes both administrative and personalizing communication.
Once you have created these fields in your account, they automatically become available to use as Dynamic Parameters in your messages. That means you have expanded fields to use to send out personalized Blasts or Conversations.
For example, you could store a contact's birthday as one of the fields and use that field to send a Blast for May birthdays and personalize each message by populating the contact's exact May birth date in the message.