Keeping your subscriber data clean and easily manageable is essential for your organization. There is nothing worse than opening a subscriber profile and seeing a large quantity of disused custom fields or badly structured data. Once a custom field is created, the custom field cannot be modified (apart from the value it contains). So it is always important to follow a structural guideline to name and manage your custom fields correctly.

Here are some best practices and tips to keep your custom fields clean, easy to read and manageable:

• Keep your custom field names in lowercase Since custom fields are case sensitive, this may cause some confusion when using the custom field in an activity. A custom field named storeID is not the same as the custom field named storeid for instance.

• Separate words with dashes rather than spaces Custom field names are counted as an object name when used in activities, which means spaces won't work when calling the object name (e.g. recipient.custom.my custom field). You would have to structure the tag as recipient.custom['my custom field'] which is less than ideal. Ideally your custom field name should look something like this when using the tag in an activity: recipient.custom.my-custom-field.

• Use activity references for activity specific custom fields If you are using a particular custom field for an activity, you may want to create a uniformed structure that references the activity. For example if we created a custom field bonus-points for use only in an activity (e.g. Activity ID 123), then you may want to name that custom field edm123-bonus-points.

• Remember custom fields can be overwritten If you are importing data to Taguchi and assign an existing custom field to a column, the data within those custom fields will be replaced with the new data being imported in that column. This will not change the remaining subscribers custom fields that are not included in the import. For example if sample@example.com was not included in the data import, that subscribers custom field will remain and will not be replaced or deleted.

You may refer to this article to find out How to create Custom Fields in Taguchi.