Mailium is one of our email marketing software which has been conceived especially for beginners and novice users. The features of Mailium have been designed with much thought to ease use. In this How-To, I will be explaining the custom field management features of Mailium and how to make use of those custom fields in your newsletters when using Mailium.

What is a Custom Field and Personalization?

The information previously obtained about the subscriber can be used to customize the content of the email you are sending for the purpose of better serving the subscriber. The type of information that was collected, excluding the email address, is called as Custom Fields. The customization of the email content based on this information is known as Personalization. Mailium allows the creation of custom fields and more information, other than email addresses, to be gathered. The content of the email can then be personalized with these custom fields.

Creating New Custom Fields

More information can easily be collected from your subscribers using the 6 available form input types, namely Text fields, Text areas, Radio buttons, Multiple select lists, Drop lists and Check boxes.

Creating custom fields with Text Fields and Text Areas are similarly performed in Mailium. Write the label of custom fields in Label field and select text field or text area from the type drop list. In case the custom field has the default value, change it in Options/Value text field.

Creating radio buttons, multiple select lists, drop lists and check boxes differs only in defining the Options/Value field. A particular format should used in Mailium to define multiple values for these fields.

[Option 1 Label],[Option 2 Label]

An unlimited number of options for these fields can be characterized by modifying the string between the square brackets and separating each option bracket with a comma.

There can be situations where you want to define different values for option labels. By default, Mailium sets the values of the options you have defined same as the option labels. For instance, if you create an option with a label “Male” for a gender custom field, Mailium will set the value of this option to “Male” corresponding to the label, unless you define a distinct value. You will therefore see “Male” on the member browsing screen as the gender custom field value of your subscriber.

As mentioned before, you may want to define dissimilar values for option labels. For example, you have an age custom field and it has options “0-18″,”19-25″ and “26-30″. However, you don’t want to set the values same as their labels due to your CRM database structure or some other reasons. Mailium allows you to define different values for each of your custom field’s options.

[Option 1 Label|Option 1 Value],[Option 2 Label|Option 2 Value]

Thus, you can set a value of “AgeGroupA” for the option “0-18″. This lets you organize your subscriber database better and integrate your subscriber data into other systems effortlessly.

Collecting extra information from your customers/subscribers is an important step in establishing good communication with your subscribers, leading to an effective email marketing.

Useful Links
Mailium Homepage – http://www.octeth.com/products/mailium/
Mailium Feature Tour – http://www.octeth.com/products/mailium/featuretour.php
Email Marketing Terms – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_marketing#E-mail_marketing_terms
HTML Form Elements – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_form#XHTML.2FHTML_forms