Two ways to hold what you know about people, and they answer different questions.
A tag is a label: someone either carries it or they do not. A field holds a value: a date, a number, a choice, a piece of text.
"Attended the live event" is a tag. "Date of birth" is a field.
Tags
Tags are managed under Audience. In Members or Contacts, open More actions and choose Tags. Manage Tags opens, where you create, edit and delete tags. Give each one a name, an icon and a colour, and a description so your team knows what it means.
Then apply them from a profile, from the list in bulk with Add Tag and Remove Tag, or during an import.
On a member's or contact's profile, Add Tag opens a search with the tags not assigned yet. Click a tag to add it, or press Enter when only one matches. If the tag does not exist yet, choose Create tag: New tag opens with your search text as the name, and the tag is assigned as soon as you save it.
Tags do not grant anything. They are for finding, filtering and segmenting: who came from which campaign, who attended, who you should call. If a label needs to unlock content, it should be a group instead.
Tags multiply quietly. Ten tags with clear names beat sixty where three mean almost the same thing. Write the description when you create the tag, not later.
Fields
Fields come in two kinds, each managed in its own place, and they do very different jobs.
- Member Fields live on member profiles. Every member has their own value. This is where date of birth, customer number, company, or whatever your business actually needs goes. You manage them under Audience in the Fields tab, and can sort them into groups so long profiles stay readable.
- Global Fields hold one value for your whole platform, not one per person: your support phone number, the date of the next intake, a link you use everywhere. You insert a global field as a placeholder into texts in the builder and in automations, and change the value in one place when it changes. You manage them in Settings under Global Fields.
Member fields then appear on every profile, in filters, in segments, in bulk actions and in the export.
Field types
Pick the type that matches the data, because it decides how the field is filled in and how you can filter on it later.
| Type | For |
|---|---|
| Text, multi-line text, rich text | Free text, short or long |
| Number | Anything you count or compare |
| Select, multi-select | A fixed list of choices |
| Yes / No | A simple switch |
| Date, time, date and time | Points in time |
| Image, file, audio, video | Uploads |
A date stored as text cannot be filtered as a date. Choosing the right type at the start saves rebuilding the field once it holds a thousand values.
Who can see and change a field
Each member field carries a Visibility setting.
- Editable, the member can change it themselves.
- Read-only, they see it but cannot change it.
- Hidden, only your team sees it.
An internal note about a customer is hidden. Their phone number is usually editable. Their customer number is read-only, because it is yours to set.
Using them
Both tags and member fields show up wherever you work with people.
- Filters on your member list: everyone with a tag, everyone whose field matches a condition.
- Segments, saved sets of those conditions.
- Bulk actions to add or remove a tag, or to set or clear a field with Set Custom Field and Clear Custom Field, on many people at once.
- Export, where you choose which fields the file contains.
The CSV import does not fill member fields. It maps name, email, language, company and address, and applies tags. Fill member fields after the import, for many people at once with Set Custom Field.
Which one do I need?
Ask what you will do with it.
- Something is either true of a person or not, and you want to find those people: tag.
- You need to store a value per person, and later filter, sort or export it: member field.
- The same value appears in many texts and should change everywhere at once: global field.
- It should unlock content: group.
Getting this right early keeps your member list useful. Getting it wrong tends to end in forty tags that should have been two fields.