We just finished helping one of our clients get better organise with the data within their Interlinked account, and thought we would share some of the explanations we gave them. We used the account data fields, which now effectively lets them store an unlimited amount of data!

First up, to set up account fields head over to Account Profile, then at the bottom of the page, you’ll see Account Data Fields.



To add a new field, just put a name in the box to refer to it. Once it’s added a reference like "EX50213" is displayed next to it. This lets developers refer to it in API calls, however for normal uses, just ignore this. To rename a field, just click the name to edit it, then click the tick button.

Should you decide to delete the field, click the red cross... It will ask to confirm this with your login password, after which the data for that field will be removed, but the actual person’s data (like their mobile number, name, email etc) stays unaffected in the account.

What can you do with a data field?
A data field can be used to narrow down the data set to better target messages. For example, below shows how to select people who gave their favourite night as Friday, Saturday or Sunday. When the green tick button is clicked, the results narrow to just include those people. These can then be further refined by making additional selections.




Data fields can also be used in the message personalisation section:



This allows you to add a prefix to appear before the data in the field and an alternative when there is no data in the field. A max length of the data to be merged in can be specified, which if the data is too long the alternative is used. This helps keep messages to within the 160 character limit. Don’t forget, you can always check what is sent in the “preview messages” on the next screen.

Data fields are also shown in other places, like viewing/editing a person. The same data fields are also available in the excel import section, so just map an excel column over to the data field and it will get imported when you click OK.

Restrictions
Data fields can’t contain more than one entry per person, so in the favourite night example, you would not be able to set a person to having Saturday & Sunday. However, to work around this, simple create a 2nd field.

Think before you collect!
All in all, the data fields should be useful to allow careful selection of people to send targeted messages to. However, it’s only ever as good as the data contained. So if you have 10 different misspellings in the same field, it will show all 10 in the selection process.

I would suggest thinking what you really want to achieve, then question if you really need all of them and rationalise it to about half of what you came up with, then start with that!