Within our Email Campaigns and SMS Campaigns, global contact fields will update our contact management system globally. This means if you are using the same list of contacts in multiple campaigns or surveys, the changes made in one campaign will be made to all the campaigns and surveys.
For example, if you update a contact's address (because they've moved) in one campaign, it will update all campaigns in your account with that contact's email address or phone (mobile) so you don't have to do it manually!
In contrast, Custom Fields 1-10 are campaign specific fields, changes made to data in these fields will be made in that campaign only.
| (Global) Contact Fields | (Campaign-Specific) Custom Fields |
|---|---|
| Invite Custom Field 1 | |
| Phone (Mobile) | Invite Custom Field 2 |
| First Name | Invite Custom Field 3 |
| Last Name | Invite Custom Field 4 |
| Address | Invite Custom Field 5 |
| Ste/Apt | Invite Custom Field 6 |
| City | Invite Custom Field 7 |
| State/Region | Invite Custom Field 8 |
| Country | Invite Custom Field 9 |
| Postal Code | Invite Custom Field 10 |
| Organization Name | |
| Division | |
| Department | |
| Team | |
| Group | |
| Role | |
| Job Title | |
| Website | |
| Phone (Home) | |
| Phone (Fax) | |
| Phone (Work) |
When To Use Each
Great question! Depending on what you're trying to do, you may need to take advantage of both the global and campaign-specific fields.
You should use Global Contact Fields when:
- For contact information, you want to be consistent across campaigns and would want to update globally (such as if one of your contacts has changed their address)
You should use Unique Custom Contact Fields when:
- For contact information that you would like to vary per email/sms campaign
- For contact information that you would not want to update globally for all email/sms campaigns
- If you've run out of room to include information in the normal global contact fields (this won't update globally but it gives you more space to pass information into your survey!)
Example:
Let's say you're sending out multiple emails to the same email address because you need a Program Director to fill out more than one survey for their different programs. Their address, phone number, etc are all the same, but their Program department is different for each campaign.
In this example, you would want to fill in all of the information that is the same across campaigns in the global contact fields. Then, instead of putting the program department into the global department field, you would put it into one of the campaign-specific Invite Custom Fields. That would ensure that each email invite contains a separate program department.
