In this article, we will go through what a subscriber field is and how to create subscriber fields in Rule.

What is a subscriber field?

A custom field can be compared to a column in Excel. If we imagine that the image below represents your file, the fields Email, Phone Number, First Name, Last Name, and Language each correspond to a column, and these are custom fields in Rule.

What is a Custom field group?

To organize your customer data efficiently and easily, you can create different groups with specific custom fields and customer information.

For example, you can create a group called Subscribers, where the custom fields include first name and last name. You can also create a group for Orders, where all order-related data is collected with different custom fields than those in Subscribers.

How do I add a group and custom fields?

1. Name the group.
2. Select whether you want the group’s data to be stored historically or not.
3. Click "+ New Field."
4. Name the custom field.
5. Choose the field format: text, multiple choice, date & time, or date. We chose date & time because we want to see the exact day and time a new member signed up. In the fields above, we selected text because first name, last name, and city will contain standard text-based information. Multiple choice means you can have several values in the same field, which will be separated by a comma (",") in Rule.
6. This will be the name of the field that developers can use for API integrations. It is named groupname.fieldname.

How to manage groups:

1. Click on Subscribers.
2. Select Custom Fields.
3. Here, you will see your groups.
4. Here, you can see how many custom fields are included in each group.
5. Here, you can choose whether a specific group and its data should be stored historically or overwritten with new data.
6. When the group was created.

What Does It Mean to Store a Member Group Historically?
When you enable historical data, a copy is saved every time a custom field is updated. For example, in the Orders group, you would want to store each specific order that a customer makes.