Sending personalized emails is a great practice to level up your cold outreach efforts, avoid spam reports and increase reply rates.

In this article, you'll learn:

A custom attribute is a user-defined characteristic, a personalized detail such as your recipient's industry, company or preferences.

You can associate custom attributes with your leads. For example, my lead Juliette likes to drink espresso in the morning and I can add that specific information as a custom attribute: Morning Drink - Espresso.

Now, if I write an email campaign and use that custom attribute, the content of my email will automatically change based on the preferences I have set for Juliette.

Before adding a custom attribute for your email campaign, make sure to set it up first. After that, you can link these custom attributes when importing a new list of leads or by doing it manually for individual contacts in your Leads lists.

First things first, let's set up a custom attribute. To do so visit the Custom Attribute section in your Leads and define a new attribute. You will need to give the attribute a name and a default value.

The default value is a value that will be used if a custom attribute has not been set for a specific lead.

After creating a new custom attribute, you only need to update your leads with this new information. You can do so by importing them via CSV file or manually editing them.

👉 Import your leads via CSV file in the Import leads section.

Next, you can map your columns to that newly created or existing attribute, e.g., Morning Drink.

You'll have something like the following in Hunter when you import your list of Leads successfully:

You can also manually edit and associate existing leads with custom attributes.

👉 To do so, click on the edit option beside your leads entry, enter the contact card, and add the attribute you want to associate with your lead at the bottom.

When composing a new email campaign, in the content section of your campaign, you can add attributes to personalize your email campaign.

👉 To add a custom attribute, just click where you want to include it in the email content, and then click the {Insert attribute} button.

You now need to select the attribute you'd like to include from the dropdown list and specify a fallback value, in case the attribute cannot be retrieved for a recipient.

The content will automatically be saved and you can review it in the Review section of your email campaign.

Custom attribute URLs come in handy when you've saved links with each lead, for example, blog posts. In this case, your leads would be associated with a Blogpost attribute featuring a unique URL.

Now, imagine you would like to automatically incorporate this attribute into your content without manual intervention, avoiding the display of the complete link, crucial to prevent the email campaign from appearing spammy. That's where custom attribute URLs come in handy.

👉 If you wish to add a custom attribute URL, highlight the text you want to turn into a hyperlink. Next, click the Insert link button at the bottom of the editor.

You can use one of the following options to include a URL in your campaign:

To add a custom attribute URL, click the Attribute tab and select your custom attribute from the dropdown list.

Click on Insert, and Campaigns will now guide you to add the URL attribute linked to each recipient.