One of the common questions I receive from my visitors is - 'can I use custom fields with your autoresponder?' So I thought I'd put up an article explaining custom fields. Now a days, every autoresponder script or autoresponder service are coming up with a feature called 'Custom Fields'.
What are Custom fields?
Custom fields are basically 'data input that is made specifically for a particular subscriber or particular autoresponder'. Custom fields are customized fields in your mailing list software to hold chunks of information like ads, signatures, links, simple text etc.
Custom fields can be 'Custom Form fields' or 'Custom admin fields'.
Custom form fields:
For example: You ask your subscribers this question - 'What color you like?' in your subscriber form. John says 'red'. Tim says 'blue'. To allow
input by your subscriber, you need to create an extra Form field called 'Color'. This 'Color' field you create for a particular form is Custom form field.
So if you sent an email to John and tim -
'Your favorite color is - {color}.'
The tag will be replaced in your email with 'red' in John's email and 'blue' in Tim's email.
Custom admin fields:
Say you want to tell your subscribers that your favorite color is 'green'. Then you will create a Custom admin field in your autoresponder like 'mycolor' with 'green' as value.
If you send email like this -
My favorite color is '{mycolor}'.
The tag will be replaced with your color and sent to all subscribers.
BASICALLY, if you want some data from subscribers, you will use 'Custom Form fields' and if you want to tell something to all of your subscribers, you will use 'Custom admin fields'. Your autoresponder should have the ability to create these fields for you.
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To check CUSTOM FIELDS:
1. Login here into Autoresponder PRO panel.
2. Click on any autoresponder name in left menu > a menu will open-up > click on Custom fields.
3. Leftmenu > PUBLIC SETTINGS > Custom fields.
You can save data and send these custom tags to your subscribers.
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Why you need them?
It is a great feature which you can utilize to customize the content of email messages.
You can easily include text or links in multiple emails at the same time.
If you need to update the text, you don't need to open tens of email to edit the content. Just edit one custom field ... viola! That will be reflected in multiple emails in your autoresponder database.
You can include your signatures, email custom headers and footers and ads with your affiliate links very easily. Easy to manage your links and ads with custom fields.
What are the FIVE uses of these Custom Fields:
1. Collect user information:
You can collect unlimited information from your users. If you are doing a survey on offline advertising, you can collect user address, phone number and age etc.
This way you can optimize your advertising campaigns or promote your product to particular group of people called list segmentation and targeted advertising.
2. Promote your products:
You can send chunks of info that will need to be updated frequently like your promotional links and coupon codes.
You can send these chunks of content by placing a simple tag in autoresponder messages. If you want to update these data, Custom fields are best option for you instead of updating the content in each email.
You can also promote affiliate products based on the interest of the subscribers. Say if the list belongs to search engines, you can promote search engine affiliate link.
3. Custom signatures:
Add Customized signatures for your different autoresponders. This way subscribers see your name with specific web site information from where they subscribed.
You can also keep private policy, antispam policy links etc.
4. Custom header and Footers:
Add Custom headers and footers for autoresponders differently. This way you can customize the layout of each autoresponder and edit them easily. You can create custom templates for headers and footers and save them like [ezine_header], [ezine_footer], [ecourse_header], [ecourse_footer] ...
5. Custom tracking links:
You can track user clicks and group users by using custom form field tags. This way you are making sublists from your main list and your advertisements are more targeted.
Tips on creating Custom fields:
* Use categories: Seperate custom fields by categories so you can manage them easily.
* Naming: Name the custom fields so you would easily pick up the one you want. Ex: Seperate your affiliate links like [affiliate link clickbank], [affiliate link regnow] etc. and your products like [my product one], [my product two] etc.
* Format: You can use both HTML and text versions of the custom fields. So your html and text emails get respective versions. Because html version needs html tags to display the content nicely.
* Headers and footers: Use custom fields to create custom headers and footers for your autoresponders.
* Test links: If you are adding links in your custom fields, test them by sending email messages to yourself. After all you want your ads work properly and get sales.
One of the best example to use custom field is: Adding subscriber details into every email like their ip number, the url where they subscribed, date of subscription, email used to subscribe and other details.
So if you have this custom fields feature in your autoresponder, use it to it's full potential to promote your products, customize autoresponders, collect information from users, promote your affiliate links etc.
