Use the `custom_field` subresource to create and store information specific to each contact.

Custom Fields Introduction

Custom fields empower you to move beyond generic contact data and build a richer, more nuanced understanding of your audience. This leads to more effective communication, better segmentation, and ultimately, stronger relationships and better results.

Custom fields are extra data fields you create to store information about your contacts, such as preferences, membership levels, and interests. Your business or organization likely needs to know more about your contacts than just their name and email. Custom fields allow you to capture information that’s directly relevant to what you do.

Custom Fields Use Cases

Use custom fields to organize contacts, send personalized email campaigns, and to identify a targeted audience for a specific campaign such as:

  • Identifying your most frequent customer demographics based on custom fields like “Age Range” or “Industry.”
  • Tracking the effectiveness of different referral sources using a “Referral Source” custom field.
  • Understanding the preferences of different customer segments to inform product development or marketing strategies.

Example

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_fields to store 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

Custom Fields Workflow

Follow this basic workflow to create and manage custom fields, and apply 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 existing custom_fields to verify whether any of the proposed `custom_field` categories already exist.
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.


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Tags: custom_fields contacts code_samples