Create and use custom fields

Contacts, lists & segmentsUpdated

Store extra data on every contact (plan, city, renewal date) and drop it into emails as a merge tag.

Go to Settings → Custom fields, fill in a Key, a Label and a Type, and click Add. From then on the field appears on every contact’s form, can be mapped from a CSV column, collected by a signup form, and used in an email as a merge tag.

Add a field

  1. Open Settings → Custom fields.
  2. Key: the internal name, and the one you type in merge tags. Keep it short and plain: plan, city, renewal_date. It’s normalised to lower case with underscores.
  3. Label: what you and your team see on forms and the contact page: “Plan”, “City”, “Renewal date”.
  4. Type: Text, Number, Date or Boolean. The type controls how the field appears for input; the value is stored as-is.
  5. Click Add.

The key can’t be changed once the field exists. If you need a different key, create a new field and re-import the values.

Fill it in

  • On the contact form: defined fields appear under a Custom fields divider on New contact and Edit.
  • From a CSV: on the import mapping screen each custom field appears as a target named custom: key. Headers matching the key or label are pre-selected. See Import contacts from a CSV.
  • From a signup form: add the field to the form’s fields table and it’s collected at signup.

A CSV column mapped to a field you later delete keeps its value on the contact but stops being shown.

Use it in an email

Every custom field is available as a merge tag:

{{ contact.properties.plan }}

The template editor’s merge-tag menu lists your fields by label. See Merge tags: personalise with contact data. Contacts with no value render nothing, so give the tag a fallback if the sentence would read oddly empty.

What custom fields can’t do

They can’t be used in segment rules. Segments match on status, list, tag, signup date and engagement only. To send to “everyone on the Pro plan”, apply a tag as well as storing the field, and build the segment on the tag.

Editing and deleting

Edit changes the label and type. Delete removes the field and stops it being shown. A field won’t delete while a live signup form still collects it. Remove it from that form (or archive the form) first.

Where to go next