New! Why and How You Can Use Custom Fields in your Emails

Earlier this week, I explained how you can send email to up to one hundred people and make it look personalized. Now I’m going to explain how to make these communications even MORE personalized with custom fields.

What do I mean by custom fields? You might know of them as merge tags or dynamic fields. Basically,you’ll be able to store something like “blue” in a personal contact’s record. Then when you type out {{favorite_color}} in the text of an email, “blue” will be substituted. And “vermillion” and “burnt umber” and “#E500ff” and so on, and so forth, for various contacts.

We’re rolling out this feature because you, our 26,000 users, hardly fit into a one-size-fits-all model. And now we’ll let you create custom dynamic fields to store any sort of customer data you’d like, from your contacts’ favorite color to their children’s names.

Here’s How to Use Custom Fields:

1) Create your Field

• Head over to the Relationships page. You can create a contact or search for a current one.
• Click “Edit” next to your contact and scroll down to the bottom of the popup.
• Enter your custom value and field, and then hit “Save” to store that information with us.

• Repeat this for all the contacts you’d like to email with a given template.

2) Reference your Field

• Head to the Templates page and create a new template.
• Click the “Dynamic Fields” button
• Choose “Custom Fields” from the left-hand menu
• Select the field you’d like to use in your template. We’ll fill out the rest.

Example custom fields

• Industry - “I’d like to chat about how what we do fits into {{industry}}....”
• Job title - “Congrats on your new role as {{job_title}}...”
• Target audience - “{{Target_audience}} find our product really useful...”
• Conference name - “Great to meet you at {{conference_name}}...”

Custom fields use case

One really neat story around custom fields comes from Douglas Arrison, founder of dasolar.com, which sells solar energy and wind power solutions. Douglas wanted to reference the average wind speed of his leads’ hometowns in Tout emails... without having to input it over and over again. Now he can pull this info from Salesforce over to Tout and save the effort of personalizing each and every email.

This degree of creativity and personalization can apply to anyone in literally any industry. Which custom fields will you use going forward? Let us know in the comments!

How to Send a Personalized Email to 100 people

You’re staring at a list of hundred people you need to contact by tomorrow for your [pick one: upcoming event/ weekly sales quota/ new customer outreach efforts/ etc] and you have no idea where to start.

We feel your pain.

Writing a personalized email for one person, let alone one hundred people can be difficult and time-consuming. So in the end, you’ll either [choose one]:

1. Stay up all night crafting personalized emails to an insane number of recipients
2. Create one bulk, impersonal mailing and then bcc everyone on it

… Yeah, we weren’t a fan of these choices, either. So in our latest product release, we’ve made it super simple to email batches of people with awesomely personalized messages using mail merge.

Here’s how to send a group email in three simple steps, rather than 100:

1) Group your contacts

In order to only hit the “Send” button once, you’ll need to put all your contacts together into a Tout group.

You can do this by uploading a CSV with contact names or by shifting them from your “Everyone” list into the proper group.

2) Create one message

Once you have all your contacts in a neat group, now you can begin to draft your message. You’ll want to use a template for this. Head over to our Templates tab, create a template name you’d like to use, and then go in to edit your message.

You’ll now see a shiny, brand new button:

Click this. Use the drop-down fields to insert all sorts of custom information that Tout will auto-fill with mail merge functionality. You can reference anything from your contacts’ children names to their favorite color to a sign-up date on your website... literally anything.

Here’s what an example template might look like with this feature:

By the way, If you’ve connected your ToutApp to Salesforce, you can even pull Lead and Contact fields into your template!

3) Send

Okay, so you have your group of people, and you have a customized template. Now it’s time to send your email. Click back to your group, and, under “Group Actions,” select “Email this Group”. Select your template on the next screen and hit “Send.” All those empty fields will be filled out with the correct recipient information.

4) You did it!

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the rest of your day knowing that you saved yourself the manual task of sending tons of emails.

Coming next: We’ll teach you how to use custom fields in your templates. Stay tuned!