Manage your contact fields
Add the fields your business actually uses, merge them into emails, and know exactly what happens to your data when you delete one.
Mailsoftly gives every contact twenty-three fields out of the box, and they cover the obvious things: name, email, company, job title, city, country. They do not cover the thing your business actually runs on. A membership number. A renewal date. Which tier someone is on. Whether they gave you consent in writing.
Contact Fields is where you add those. Once a field exists you can fill it from an import, greet people with it in an email, build a segment on it and start an automation from it. This guide covers all of that, and it does not skip the question everyone asks too late: what happens to the data when you delete a field.
Open Contact Fields
Contact Fields is the fifth tab in the audience row, next to Contacts, Contact Lists, Segments and Tags. Open Contacts and click across.
The screen is one table with three columns:
- Field Name is the field, with a small badge to its left. A padlock means the field ships with Mailsoftly. A pen means you made it.
- Personalized is the merge tag for that field, on a copy chip. One click puts it on your clipboard, and the tooltip flips to Copied.
- The last column holds the actions menu, and it only appears on fields you made.
Total beside the page title counts every field, yours and ours together. Search by Name filters as you type, and the Sort chip offers Name A→Z and Name Z→A. Your sort choice is remembered for next time.
Open your contact fields in Mailsoftly
Know which fields are yours
The three pills split the same table.
- All Fields is everything, with a running count.
- Default Fields is the twenty-three that ship with Mailsoftly: first name, last name, job title, email, phone, address, note, date of birth, interests, country, city, mobile phone, work phone, industry, company, website, address line 1, address line 2, state, zip code, opt in date, created at and source. You cannot rename these, delete these, or add to them, which is why they have no actions menu.
- Custom Fields is the ones you created. This is the pill worth living in.
A field is a box; it is not a value. Creating Service tier does not put anything in it. Every contact starts with the box empty, and until you fill it, anything you build on the field will simply not match anyone.
Create a field
Press Create Custom Field. The window asks for one thing: a name.
There is no type to choose, because Mailsoftly custom fields are text, and the window says so: "Custom fields are text." That single rule shapes everything else in this guide. You can absolutely store a date, a number or a yes-or-no in a custom field, and the rest of the product will read it, but you are the one keeping it consistent, because nothing validates what goes in.
Type the name and press Create. It is there immediately, at the top of your custom fields, with its merge tag already built.
Spend ten seconds on the name. It is the label on every contact profile, the entry in every import dropdown, the option in every segment rule, and it is baked into the merge tag, so Service tier gives you {(Service tier)}. Three things make later life easier. Keep it short, because it has to read well inside a sentence you are typing into an email. Keep it stable, because renaming it does not go back and fix tags you already typed. And watch the whitespace: a trailing space makes a second, identical looking field with its own separate column of data.
Nothing caps how many fields you can create. That is not an invitation. Every field you add is another column in the import mapper, another option in the segment builder, and another thing someone on your team has to fill in correctly. Five fields that are always populated beat twenty that are half empty.
Put data in the field
An empty field is useless, so fill it in the same motion that brought the contacts in.
- At import. In the mapping step, a column that matches nothing is offered to you as a new field. Click the pending badge and choose Create New Custom Field, or point the column at a custom field you already have; existing fields appear in the dropdown under Custom Fields. Mailsoftly will not let you past the mapping step until every unmatched column has a decision. The whole flow is in Import contacts and manage lists.
- One person at a time. Open a contact and find the Custom Fields card on the Contact Details tab. It lists only the fields that person has a value for, and every row edits in place. Add Custom Field lets you pick an existing field and type a value. Understand a contact profile walks the rest of that screen.
The Add Custom Field card on a contact profile has a second mode, Add new custom field. That one does not just fill a box for one person, it creates the field on your whole account, exactly as if you had pressed Create Custom Field here. It is the quickest way to end up with Tier, tier and Service tier all living side by side.
Merge the field into an email
This is what the Personalized column is for. Every field has a merge tag, and the shape of it is always the same:
{(field_name)} with the field’s name exactly as it appears in the table, spaces and capitals included. So {(first_name)} for a default field, and {(Service tier)} for a custom one.
Type it, or paste it from the copy chip, anywhere in your email. It works in the body and it works in the subject line. When the campaign goes out, each person’s copy gets their own value in that spot.
You do not have to type it from memory in the composer. In the drag and drop editor the merge tag menu lists everything under Contact Fields, and your own fields carry a (Custom Field) label so you can tell them apart. In the simple composer, the Personalize button beside the subject opens a panel split into Contact fields and Custom fields, and clicking a chip drops the tag where your cursor is.
Give every tag a fallback, because a contact with an empty box would otherwise get a hole in your sentence. Write {(Service tier OR "your plan")} and anyone missing a value reads "your plan" instead. This is the difference between "Your Retainer renewal is due" and "Your renewal is due", which is fine, and "Your renewal is due", which is not.
On a campaign that already exists, the Personalize picker beside the subject line lists the standard fields only; your custom fields are not in that particular menu yet. The tag still works there. Copy it from the Personalized column on this screen and paste it into the subject.
Filter and trigger on the field
Once a field holds data, two more parts of Mailsoftly can read it.
Segments. In the rule builder, the field dropdown groups everything into Default Fields, Custom Fields and Tags. Your fields sit in the middle group under the exact name you gave them, and you get the text operators: Equals, Contains, Starts With, Ends With, Does not contain, Is Empty and Is Not Empty. Matching ignores capitals, so a rule looking for retainer finds Retainer. There are no greater-than or less-than operators for a custom field, which is the practical limit of storing everything as text. Segment your audience covers the builder.
Automations. There is one trigger built specifically on your own fields: "Start on a date from each contact", in the Date & Time group of the trigger picker. Choose it and Which date field? offers Birthday plus every custom field you have. Pick one, choose when it should run relative to that date (on the day, or 1, 3, 7, 14 or 30 days before or after), and decide whether it repeats every year. Renewals, memberships, policy end dates and anniversaries all live here.
That trigger reads a text box and tries to make a date out of it, so the format is on you. Write dates as 2027-03-14 and it is unambiguous forever. 03/14/2027 is also understood. A plain number is deliberately ignored, so a field holding 14 will never fire anything. A contact whose value Mailsoftly cannot read as a date is quietly skipped, with nothing to tell you. If you plan to trigger on a field, pick one format on day one and hold your import files to it.
Rename or delete a field
The actions menu on any custom field row holds two items, and they are not equally dangerous.
Edit renames the field. Mailsoftly moves the name and carries every stored value across with it, on every contact, in one step. Nothing is lost. Renaming Tier to Service tier keeps every value exactly where it was.
What a rename does not do is chase down the old name everywhere else you typed it. A {(Tier)} tag sitting in a saved template, a segment rule pointing at Tier, an automation triggering on Tier: none of those are rewritten. Rename, then search your templates and rules for the old name. And do not rename a field to a name another field already uses, because the two will collide and the one you overwrite will not survive it.
Delete removes the field from your account and, in the same action, removes that field’s value from every single contact you have. Mailsoftly asks once: "Are you sure? This action is irreversible."
It means exactly what it says. Deleting a field is not hiding a column, it is deleting the data. Every value your contacts had in that field is erased across your whole account, there is no trash to recover it from, there is no undo, and nothing is written to the contact’s own activity log, so afterwards there is no record that the values ever existed. The only way back is to import them again from wherever you originally got them. If you are not certain, rename the field to something like Old service tier and leave it alone for a month instead. That costs you one row on this screen and keeps every value intact.
Deleting a field does not touch your contacts otherwise. Nobody is unsubscribed, removed from a list or deleted, and campaigns you already sent are unchanged. Campaigns you have not sent yet will render {(deleted field)} as a blank space, so the tag will not leak into anyone’s inbox, but the sentence around it will read strangely. Sweep your drafts and templates before you delete, not after. Design your email is where those tags live.
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