Hi - I have a client with a survey that has more than 100 questions.
I’m wondering if I can pass those into some custom campaign merge fields (since there are more than 100, can’t use regular custom fields in the contact record)
My guess is that most of the questions have fixed options and could be tagged instead of custom fields. My general rule of thumb is: always use tags unless questions are open-ended or if you need to merge the day into emails.
Campaign merge fields are manually setup and not pragmatically. As @Tyler_Garns has stated, consider tags whenever possible. There are other things like storing in list fields etc, but that makes information un-actionable which really defeats the purpose of a survey.
General rule of thumb, if you can represent something in a two state process (yes/no, true/false, on/off, selected/not selected) then a tag can be used in the place of a custom field.
Hi thank you both for replying. Yes the information does need to be inserted into the emails, that’s why I’m thinking merge fields. It’s not a survey necessarily, wrong wording there on my part – it’s taking information such as the date of their next event and the location of their event (it’s for a company providing corporate travel solutions) and putting that into their email. As well as things like, what airlines have they gotten quotes from, and so on.
If I did use regular custom fields for some of these, what happens when I build this out in my own app then move it to their app?
I know I would still need to create the custom fields in their app, but what happens to all the merge fields, form fields, etc I built into the campaign?
I am still unsure if I should use regular custom fields or merge fields for this campaign. We’ve actually narrowed it down now to not need more than 100 - so could technically use custom fields.
I think I’m just confused about what the pros/cons are of using campaign merge fields vs custom fields…
Anyone have comments on these?
If a sales rep needs to be able to click on a contact record and see certain data such as a client’s travel dates, that likely should be a custom field, right?
As well as any fields that need to be linked to a field timer? (ie assigning a task the day before a client’s departure date)
Campaign merge fields allow you to set values that you can use in content within a campaign. So say you have a link to a newsletter online you send in an email, however, that link might change every week. By using a campaign merge field, you can just change it in the one place and have it affect every place you use it. Caveat is that it is only relevant to the campaign and not to the contact. Custom fields are assignable values that can be uniquely stored and set on individual contacts. They can be used within campaign content as well using standard merge fields.
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I was on a Plusthis webinar and one of the featured guest hosts were these folks. Could be what you’re looking for. https://fieldspace.io/
Fieldspace is terrific if you are able to archive the custom fields that are no longer used in active web forms…to free up that number of custom fields to be created/used. So if you archived 20, you’d have 20 available custom fields to use. At this point, Fieldspace doesn’t have the capability to extend the number of active custom fields past the default 100.
Yeah, that’s our finding as @Cheryl_Hunt has said. We have considered using the contact fields as “swap” fields and then the remainder of the 600 available could be swapped around with an http post…obviously api work.