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Guides and Tutorials Subscriber Fields and Tags

Subscriber Fields and Tags

The Subscriber Fields and Tags page allows you to manage all your subscriber fields and tags.

Subscriber Fields

What is a Subscriber Field?

Personalizing your marketing efforts is crucial for efficient and effective advertising. Imagine receiving a recommendation from a trusted friend, rather than an anonymous sales pitch. To achieve this level of customization, it's important to collect data about your customers. However, collecting and storing personal data comes with responsibilities.

If your company is in Europe, you must follow the General Data Protection Regulation. This means only collecting the data necessary for business purposes, storing it securely, informing customers about the data you're collecting and why, and limiting access to only a select few who have been trained on handling personal data.

In addition to following GDPR regulations, it's also important to consider the amount of data you collect from your customers. With each additional form field, you risk decreasing the likelihood that a customer will complete the registration form. As a result, it's important to be selective about what data you request in your subscription form.

A settings page showing existing subscriber fields and tags as well as the options to add new ones.

Next, let's look at how Subscriber Fields are defined and used in Maildroppa.

Subscriber Field Characteristics and Types

A subscriber field consists of a Field Name, a Personalization Tag Name, and a Field Type.

Field Name

The Field Name is a label that you can freely choose for custom subscriber fields. It can be up to 255 characters in length.

Tag Identifier

The Tag Identifier is a technical identifier created from the name of a subscriber field. It consists of lowercase letters (a-z), digits (0-9), and underscores, and is based on the ASCII character set. The Tag Identifier is listed on the Subscriber Fields page and can be used to manually create the Personalization Tag.

Personalization tags are an effective tool in email marketing that allow you to personalize your campaigns, making them more relevant and engaging for the recipient. They are created by surrounding the Tag Identifier with double curly braces {{}}. For example, the subscriber field "First Name" becomes the Tag Identifier "first_name" and the Personalization Tag {{first_name}}. When used in an email marketing campaign, the Personalization Tag is replaced with the individual values for each subscriber, making the message feel more personalized and relevant.

A Maildroppa interface showing subscriber fields with their types and tag names.

Field Type

Maildroppa offers several field types that can be divided into two categories: unrestricted and restricted field types. The unrestricted field types, including Text, Textarea, Email, Number, and Date, allow for any input and have no predefined value sets.

In contrast, the restricted field types, such as Radio Button, Checkbox, and Dropdown, define a set of predefined values that a subscriber can choose from, allowing for more standardized and error-free data input. All field values entered into Maildroppa are validated to ensure they meet the requirements for their respective field type.

Note: Unrestricted field types allow for greater flexibility and a wider range of input values, but restricted field types provide a more streamlined and efficient data input process.

A dialog box used for the creation of new subscriber fields based on their type.

Unrestricted Field Types

  • Text: Accepts any text input, up to 255 characters long.

  • Textarea: Allows any text input up to 255 characters long, with a multi-line input field.

  • Email: Only accepts email addresses, up to 255 characters long.

  • Number: Accepts numbers between -2147483648 and 2147483647.

  • Date: Allows selecting a date from a date picker or entering it manually.

Restricted Field Types

Maildroppa allows you to define data with restricted, predefined value sets, which can contain up to 30 values, each with a maximum length of 255 characters. This helps standardize data input and reduces errors.

These field types make it easier for subscribers to select a value compared to free text input, and also allow you to categorize subscribers into different segments based on the selected values, making it easier to target specific groups with newsletter campaigns.

For example, you could create a European Union Country data type with all countries in the EU, and later target customers in Italy or Belgium for a newsletter campaign.

Restricted field types in Maildroppa include:

  • Radio Button

  • Checkbox

  • and Dropdown

All of these types allow the selection of only one value at a time, but they differ in their visual representation. The Dropdown type is useful for displaying many options, as it saves space compared to a long list of Radio Buttons or Checkboxes.

Subscriber Field Variations

Maildroppa offers two variations of subscriber fields: default fields and custom fields.

Default Fields

Maildroppa provides two default subscriber fields: First Name and Email. They cannot be edited or deleted. The Email field is mandatory as email marketing cannot be performed without an email address.

Custom Fields

In addition to the two default fields, you can create up to 28 custom subscriber fields to meet your business needs. In total, Maildroppa supports 30 subscriber fields.

Adding a New Custom Field

Here's how to add a new custom field:

  1. Go to the Subscriber Fields section.

  2. Click on Add a New Field in the top right corner.

  3. Enter a name for the field.

  4. Choose the field type: Text, Textarea, Email, Number, and Date, Radio Buttons, Checkbox, or Dropdown.

  5. Click Add.

A Maildroppa dialog box allowing for the creation of a custom subscriber field.

Editing a Custom Field

To edit a custom subscriber field, follow these steps:

  1. Locate the field that you want to edit in the Subscriber Fields page.

  2. Click on the three dots at the end of the field's row.

  3. Select Edit from the options.

  4. In the pop-up window, modify the field name and type as desired.

  5. Confirm the changes by clicking Change.

Please note: You can only edit custom fields that are currently not in use. Just imagine what terrible things could happen if you change the input type of the Last Name field from Text to Date. What date would the last name "Muller" correspond to?

Deleting a Custom Field

To delete a custom subscriber field:

  1. Locate the field that you want to delete in the Subscriber Fields page.

  2. Click on the three dots at the end of the field's row.

  3. Select Delete from the options.

  4. If the field is currently in use, a pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm the deletion by typing DELETE in the text field.

Please note: Deleting a field can result in the permanent loss of all values for that field for all subscribers. Therefore, if the field is assigned a value by one or more subscribers, a confirmation prompt will appear requiring you to type DELETE in the text box before deletion can take place. Deleting a field is irreversible.

If the field is in use by a sign-up form, segment, or a filter for a scheduled newsletter, deletion is not possible as it would break these components.

Subscriber Fields Overview

On the Subscriber Fields page, you can see an overview of all of your subscriber fields. The default fields, First Name and Email, are displayed first. Then, a list of all of your custom subscriber fields, if any, is displayed with their Field Name, Personalization Tag Name, and Field Type

A screen showing an overview of the subscriber fields including the names, types, and personalized tag names.

Subscriber Field Usage

Subscriber Fields are used to collect and store information from your subscribers. As explained before, Email is a mandatory field, as it is necessary for sending any kind of email. All other fields are optional, but when creating a sign-up form, you can mark fields as required to determine which information is necessary for that particular form.

A dialog box used to add a form field.

You can view and modify the field values of each subscriber on the Subscriber Details Page. You also have the option to import subscribers with custom field values, provided you have created the fields beforehand, or export them.

As described earlier, by using Personalization Tags, the individual values of each subscriber field can also be referenced in Newsletter Campaigns and this way help to personalize your campaigns. This will improve the conversion rate of your emails. To learn more about how Personalization Tags can be used in email marketing campaigns, click here.

In addition, you can use Subscriber Fields to create individual filters and decide which subscribers will receive a particular email campaign. For example, you can send an email only to subscribers who have specified their country as "Netherlands".

These filters can also be saved as "segments" for future use, allowing you to divide your subscriber list into different segments.

Next, let's look at Subscriber Tags, which are managed below Subscriber Fields.

Subscriber Tags

What is a Subscriber Tag?

Subscriber Tags are another powerful tool for organizing and segmenting your email subscribers. Unlike Subscriber Fields, which have unique values for each subscriber, Subscriber Tags have a single value that acts as a shared label for all subscribers who have been assigned the tag.

As an example, let's say you run a surfing school and want to send targeted emails to different skill levels of surfers. You can create tags for "Beginner Surfer", "Advanced Surfer", and "Expert Surfer" and assign them to your subscribers based on their experience level.

This allows you to send relevant and personalized emails to each segment, increasing the impact of your email marketing campaigns. Learn more about subscriber segmentation here.

The Maildroppa tags section displaying Beginner, Advanced, and Expert tags which can be used for subscriber segmentation.

Adding a Subscriber Tag

To add a new tag, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the Tags section, which is located below the Subscriber Fields section.

  2. Click on Add a New Tag in the top right corner.

  3. Enter a name for the tag. The name can be up to 255 characters in length.

  4. Click Add

Renaming a Subscriber Tag

To change the name of a tag, follow these steps:

  1. Locate the tag that you want to rename in the Tags section.

  2. Click on the three dots at the end of the tag’s row.

  3. Select Rename from the options.

  4. In the pop-up window, modify the tag name as desired.

  5. Confirm the changes by clicking Change.

Please note: Tags that are currently in use cannot be renamed. We decided not to support this, as, it would be very confusing, when, for example a tag BEGINNER would suddenly be named EXPERT.

Deleting a Subscriber Tag

How to Delete a tag:

  1. Locate the tag you wish to delete in the Tags section of the Subscriber Fields page.

  2. Click on the three dots at the end of the tag's row.

  3. Select Delete from the options.

  4. If the tag is currently in use, you will be prompted to confirm the deletion by typing DELETE in the text field.

Please note: Deleting a tag is irreversible and if the tag is in use by a sign-up form, a segment, or by a scheduled newsletter campaign, it cannot be deleted as it would cause errors.

Subscriber Tag Usage

Subscriber Tags can be assigned manually, or automatically.

Manual Assignment

There are two ways to manually assign tags to your subscribers:

  1. By importing subscribers through a CSV file that includes the tags.

  2. By editing individual subscribers on the Subscriber Details page.

Tags manually being added to an email subscriber's profile.

Automatic Assignment

You can also automatically assign tags to subscribers through the following methods:

  1. Setting up a sign-up form that automatically assigns one or more tags to the subscriber.

  2. Assigning tags to links in a newsletter campaign. When a subscriber clicks on a link, they will be tagged with the corresponding tag.

Please note: When assigning a tag to a subscriber through a newsletter campaign, it is important to consider the rules of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in case they apply to you. You can adjust your GDPR agreement consent statement and actively ask for permission to collect this information and use it for marketing purposes on the Marketing Permissions Page.
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