Taguchi allows you to manage unlimited subscriber records to use for sending emails, SMS messages and interacting with webforms. Subscriber records consist of personally identifable information such as an email address, phone number or unique external ID (such as your own unique identifier for subscribers). This forms the basis of a subscriber profile as one of these fields is required in order for a subscriber to be saved in Taguchi.

Subscriber profiles consist of two types of fields, standard fields and custom fields.

Standard fields

Standard fields are fields that have been pre-set by Taguchi, these fields include address information, gender, date of birth and more (see below). Standard fields are available within all subscriber profiles by default and allow you to maintain common fields in an easy to use and accessible way, as all standard field names remain the same.

List of standard fields

The standard fields available within Taguchi are detailed below along with their respected data type:

Field name	Data type
First Name	String
Last Name	String
Email Address^	A valid RFC 2822 email address (validated)
Phone^	Numeric characters only (no phone number validation)
Title	String
Address	String
Address line 2	String
Address line 3	String
Suburb	String
State	String
Postcode	String
Country	String
Gender	String
Date of birth	A valid ISO 8601 short date (YYYY-MM-DD)
External ID^	String
Cluster ID	A valid cluster ID
Notifications	String
Global unsubscribe flag	A valid ISO 8601 full date/time (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss)
Invalid flag	A valid ISO 8601 full date/time (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss)
Notifications	String
Additional data	String

^ At least one of these are required as a unique identifier

Custom fields

Custom fields are non-standard fields that you can customise and assign yourself. You can assign a name and value to a custom field, and use the data stored within the custom field in target expressions, activity content and when generating extracts.

Creation of Custom fields

• To create a custom field, click on the green 'add new field' button under "Custom fields" in the "Settings" tab of your organisation.
• You may then input the required information for the custom fields set up.

To learn more about creating custom fields, please refer to our article on how to set up Custom fields.

Importance of keeping consistency

When a custom field is created within Taguchi for the first time, it will immediately be available in other subscriber profiles for use. Existing custom fields are shown in subscriber profiles when adding a new custom field, but it is important to match the custom field name exactly when conducting a manual import.

For example, if you have a custom field named membernumber that already exists against subscriber profiles within Taguchi, importaing a new subscriber list and assigning a custom field named member_number will not match the existing custom field. This will create an entirely new custom field (as the names are different, note the underscore). This splits your subscriber data into two, making the custom field usage in target expressions and activity content inconsistent and very difficult to use.

It is very important to keep your custom field names consistent to ensure ease of use and data integrity. Multiple custom fields with varying, but similar names will cause a headache when the time comes to use the custom field.

Date & Time

When importing date and/or time as the value of a custom field, the date/time format must be in ISO 8601 notation, YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss so our system will use date predicates for this custom field and you can compare dates or use comparison operators such as >, <, >= and <= in your target expression.

Case sensitivity

Custom field names are also case sensitive, this means a custom field named membernumber is not the same as memberNumber (note the uppercase N).

Overwriting custom fields

Can you overwrite a custom field value? Yes you can. If you wish to upload unique data and avoid overwriting any existing data, simply use a new custom field name. To check if a custom field name exists, simply locate a subscriber profile and add attempt to add a new custom field, if the custom field you intend to add is within the dropdown list, simply use an alternative custom field name to prevent overwriting existing data.

Deleting custom fields

The only way to remove a custom field is to make the value stored against the custom field in the subscriber profile null (empty). Once a custom field is added to the database, we recommend simply overwriting the data within the field. A custom field cannot be removed from the database.

Recommendations & Tips

• Ensure your custom field names are consistent
• Use underscores instead of spaces, or simply prevent the use of spaces in custom field names
• Be wary of custom field name case sensitivity
• Be aware of of any existing custom field names to prevent data from being overwritten

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