Using choice fields

EmailOctopus offers various types of custom fields to store information about your subscribers. The text, number and date fields accept any supported value you or your subscribers choose. The choice fields, on the other hand, offer predefined values. When adding new fields, you can create choice fields where people have to choose one of the available options, or pick multiple.

Use case example

Let's say you'd like to ask people how often they wish to receive emails from you or which type of content they are interested in. In such a case, adding a text field would allow people to type anything they want. Because of that, many answers would be completely different, and segmenting your audience using such data would be challenging.

A choice field would allow you to create predefined values for such cases. For example, asking your subscribers about their ideal email frequency would let them select between weekly or monthly updates, while the question about their content interests could use a list with checkboxes, enabling people to pick multiple options.

Those predefined values differentiate choice fields from other types, giving them unique options across our platform.

Subscriber profiles

When using choice fields on the Subscriber profile page, you can choose whether your field options will display as a list or in a dropdown. By default, they will show in a list. To change a field to a dropdown, click on the form and then on a field to highlight it. The display options will appear on the left-hand menu.

Landing pages and forms

When you add a choice field to a landing page or a form, you can choose whether it should display as a dropdown or a list, just like on the Subscriber profile page. There's also an option to mark that field as hidden.

When using a hidden choice field, you have to select which value (or values, if it's a multiple-choice field) will be added to subscribers who sign up using this landing page or form.

Imports

When you import contacts with choice fields, you must make sure that the imported values match the ones you created for that field. For multiple-choice fields, you can import multiple values at once by separating them with commas.

You can also create new choice fields during import. When you use that option, you'll be prompted to provide the choices your contacts can select later.