How to Create Custom Object & Custom Fields for Contact Data Management

Factoreal has various standard contact fields (like email, first name, last name, company, city, country, phone number, etc.) readily available by default. You can use these attributes on contacts so that they can be segmented and targeted easily in your marketing campaigns.

You can change the labels or the personalization tags of your account’s standard fields for your convenience. To do this, perform the following steps.

  1. Go to Settings.
  2. Click Rules Setup.
  3. Click Custom Data.
  4. Click Create Custom Fields.
  5. In the Field Name enter a name of your choice. For example, it can be Domain, or Industry.
  6. Select the Field type. Field type can be a text, numeric, date, flag, text array depending on the purpose of the custom field. Examples of some custom fields: If it’s a name the Field type should be Text. If the Field type should be a date if custom field is for date type attribute like: Last Contacted, or Date joined. You can have a custom field which can support multiple values like for hobbies or skills, or education degree, for which you should add an array type field.
  7. Fill the Personalization Tag, which is what you will use in the email personalization.
  8. You can also define a Default Value which will be substituted if no value is available for the field in case of personalization. Ex: If you use ‘Hi, First-name’ for personalization and if the contact does not have the first name value and the default value is User then you the recipient would receive: Hi User.
  9. If the custom field is for something which is unique for each contact like an additional id or a secondary phone number then you also make the field to be optionally unique so that duplicate values cannot be saved.
  10. Click Create Field.
  11. Click Go Back to go to the previous page and here, you will find your created custom field(s)
  12. Click Create Field.

You can edit and delete your custom fields any time by clicking settings under Action.

Custom Objects: What’s the purpose of Custom Objects?

Factoreal provides you with default contact fields and also the option to add custom fields to your contacts, but what if you want to add additional information like appointment schedule, tickets purchased, interest shown, which could have a many-to-one contact relationships of their details are not directly related to the contact but can be used with marketing campaigns?

These are called Custom Objects.

Factoreal has default such object for Orders. But custom objects can be added for any such entity.

To create a custom object, perform the following steps:

  1. Click Custom Objects.
  2. Click Create New Object.
  3. Enter the name of the object and click Next.
  4. Add attributes of the custom object. Click Add Attribute.
  5. Select one of the attributes to be unique: As Custom Objects could be multiple for each contact they require an identifier which is unique for each custom object record. 
  6. Select one unique custom object attribute to be a primary key.
  7. Click Save Object.
  8. Link the custom object with contacts – the custom objects need to be linked with a contact for which a custom field of the type as that custom object needs to be added and linked using a contact primary id.
  9. Add a contact custom field.
  10. Select the field type as the custom object from the dropdown.
  11. Select either one of the contact primary IDs: Email or Phone number.

An example of a custom object could be Appointment. If you want to store the appointment details of customer as a custom object then the unique appointment id field could be the primary identifier of each appointment and contact’s email address would be used to identify which contact’s appointment details are stored in that custom object record like the date-time, reason or purpose of the appointment. This way there can be multiple appointments and each appointment would belong to a contact. This way Factoreal will know which record to update and when to create new records.