Custom fields are an enormous help when you want to send automated emails that look like you just crafted them yourself, and made some research about your prospects. With this feature, you can add information to your emails about your prospects and about yourself and make your emails much more personalized.
When you add a custom field to your message template, the system will automatically fill this field with the correct prospect/sender data when the message is sent, so that you don't have to personalize every message manually!
For example, if you create such a template:
Hi {{first_name}}, I think that you as the {{job_title}} in {{company_name}} might be the right person to reach out to.
The prospect whose name is Michael, and he works as a Director of HR in XYZ company will receive:
Hi Michael, I think that you as the Director of HR in XYZ might be the right person to reach out to.
In this article you can learn more about how custom fields work and how to utilize them in your campaigns:
Prospects & company custom fields
The custom fields available in our app contain information about the specific person as well as their company. For all prospects generated in Growbots, you can see information like first name, last name, gender, country, department, seniority, position, industry, and timezone. This information can be used in your email templates to make them more personal and targeted.
You can also use custom fields when the prospects are imported. All you need to do is to include the data that you would like to use in personalized emails (eg. job title, company name, company domain, country etc.) in the imported file. Then you need to map a column with the correct field in Growbots while Import Mapping stage at the import campaign (please check this article to learn more about importing and mapping the prospects).
Sender custom fields
You can also use sender custom fields, which are set up for each email account you have connected to Growbots separately. You can set them up in Settings -> Integrations by going into each email account's settings. The custom field will put the data linked to the email account from which the message is sent.
In the email account connection process, you can add your first name, last name, company (these are the 3 required fields), position, phone number, and social media information to your profile (you can learn how to add custom fields data to your email account in this article). You can also create your email signature there.
Using custom fields
Now that you know how you can benefit from custom fields, let’s move on to how to use them! You add custom fields when creating/editing an email template (here's an article about creating these ones).
All available custom fields are visible on the right side of the text editor.
You can use them in any text area: sender’s details, subject line and the body of the message.
To use a custom field, place your cursor in the text area and click on the selected custom field.
Our tips:
1. Use “{{sender_first_name}} {{sender_last_name}}” in sender’s field to always have the right name displayed in prospect’s inbox.
2. Remember to use the sender_signature custom field in your templates.
3. People love to see their name! Remember to add {{first_name}} to the greeting. Also, mentioning something you know about their job (like position or the department) is a nice touch.
Now, you can also use a custom field called random condition, a form of Spintax, that lets you insert a list of words or phrases into a template. When the email is sent to a prospect, the template will randomly select one of the phrases to display. This feature functions similarly to any other custom field available. You can read more about it here!
Adding new custom fields
If you really want to take your personalization game to the next level, you will want to use more than the standard Growbots-provided custom fields. We don’t limit you to only our database fields. Adding your own, new custom fields is as easy as ABC. There are actually two ways of doing that:
Go to the template editor and head to the Custom fields section. Choose if you want to add a custom field to prospects or company. Click on the “+” button, type the name of your custom field and select Add. Your new custom field was just added! Now you can use it in your emails.
Go to Settings → Custom fields, type in your new custom field and click Add (you can switch between Prospect/Company custom fields in this section):
Remember to fill out new custom fields for all prospects in your campaign. Otherwise, the space for the custom field information will be empty. The best way of filling those custom fields is while scheduling a batch of the prospects, on the Review custom fields step:
Here's a video on advanced personalization using custom custom fields:
Editing custom fields
You can edit prospect/company custom fields for any of your prospects if you decide to change their personal information or you want to fill out your new custom fields.
Create a new campaign, generate or import the prospects.
On the Review custom fields step, you will be able to see the entire list of prospects generated or imported to this project.
Go through the list of prospects and make sure that there are no empty custom fields. We display only custom fields used in the selected sequence and each prospect custom field is editable.
As for the sender custom fields, you can check how to edit them in the article about connecting email accounts.