Example of How to Use Global Fields: Our New Phone #
Articles & Tips - Justin Premick - May 8th, 2008 - PermalinkWe recently set up an easy-to-remember phone number for you to contact us: 1-877-AWEBER-1
In addition to making remembering how to get in touch with our Customer Solutions Team easier, this presents an opportunity to answer a question that I never really was able to demonstrate very well when customers asked:
What good are Global Fields? How would I use them?
In this instance, using Global Fields saved me a lot of time updating our various customer, affiliate and prospect newsletters. Here’s how:
What Global Fields Do
Global fields are kind of like personalization variables that store and display information about you instead of information about your subscribers.
For example, you can insert your signature file into any message using the {!signature} variable. This variable pulls information that you enter into your account at the Global Fields page.
If you ever wanted to change your signature, you would simply update it at the Global Fields page, instead of editing each of your messages individually.
How Global Fields Minimize Tedious Cutting-and-Pasting
If you’re subscribed to our Test Drive, or this blog’s newsletter, or our customer newsletter, you know that you can find our support contact information (phone numbers and hours of operation) near the end of any of the messages we send you.
Between all of our various lists, there are probably close to 100 follow up messages that display our phone number. You’d think changing it would be a lot of cutting and pasting.
The thing is, we don’t actually type the phone number into the emails. We created global fields for US Phone, International Phone, and Support Hours, and we inserted the appropriate variables into our emails:
So, instead of having to cut and paste 1-877-AWEBER-1 a hundred-plus times, I only had to do it once per list, at the Global Fields page:
Before
After
That’s it! One change per list, which took a fraction of the time it would have if I’d had to edit 100+ messages individually.
What Else Can You Use Global Fields For?
Use them to insert any information about you or your business that might change periodically:
Oh, and About That Phone Number…
Just a reminder: the new toll-free phone number is 1-877-AWEBER-1.
AND, this toll-free number works from Canada, too! Those of you in the Great White North can get your questions answered toll-free, just like our users in the States.
The old 800-531-5065 number will continue to work for now, but we’ll probably phase it out eventually. If/when we do, we’ll let you know.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 9:04 am and is filed under Articles & Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:18 am
So that is what that does
I am tired of typing in my web site links.
Thanks!
May 8th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
What if you want to have more than one signature because you have more than one web site/
May 8th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Cindy,
Are you referring to having different signatures for different campaigns/lists?
If so, you’d simply set up the appropriate signature in the appropriate list (toggle between lists using the dropdown menu on the right side of the control panel).
May 8th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Cindy,
I have just added a separate global field for each web site as I use three.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:25 am
Thanks, Justin, for clarifying the use of global fields. It’s another one of AWeber’s features that I’ve used but not as well as I could. I like the idea of adding a slogan to it. As for contact information, that’s critical to provide, but without intensive labor of entering it every time.
Thanks again.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:28 am
P.S.
Good to see your smiling face in the blog also.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Hi!
Here is another great feature of {!GLOBAL FIELDS}
Use them to specify a URL and it won’t get changed to
http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=CXbfJ…,
when click tracking is on! That way you can have
tracked and untracked URLs in one broadcast email at
the same time.
For example:
Fieldname: mainsiteurl
Value: http://www.example.com
Use in plaintext:
{!global mainsiteurl}
Use in HTML:
<a href="{!global mainsiteurl}">{!global mainsiteurl}</a>
or
<a href="{!global mainsiteurl}">Web Site Title</a>
I found this quite useful.
Have a nice weekend, folks.
May 13th, 2008 at 6:47 am
That’s a good idea John! I didn’t know you could do that.
Here’s a way I recently used Global Fields for my Daily Quote newsletter.
I wanted to use an apostrophe to identify the email as Name’s Daily Quote. But I didn’t want the apostrophe to display in the feed.
See here: http://www.aweber.com/z/article/?inspiredaily&ID=AEwMDBy0DCy0zAwEDGxczExcDJx0LCzs7AyctAwsAA==
I was using {!firstname_fix}’s. Since I display the feed on other sites, I didn’t want people clicking over to see the ’s just sitting there, so I changed it to a Global Field; {!global apostrophe}.
So now it displays properly in the RSS feed!
http://www.aweber.com/z/article/?inspiredaily&ID=AEwMDBy0DKy0jEwEDOxcrAxczGx0rEzsbKxstAwsAA==