How to Create and Use Custom Lead Fields

Dripify helps you personalize your outreach at scale with Custom Lead Fields. You’re no longer limited to the data available on a lead’s LinkedIn profile — you can import your own data from a CSV and use it as custom variables in Send invite, Message, InMail, and Send email actions in your sequence. This gives you the flexibility to add unique URLs, custom notes, pain points, event details, personalized compliments, and any other lead-specific information to your outreach — or even send fully personalized messages to each lead.

You can also import custom email addresses from a CSV or add them manually to the Lead card and use these addresses for email outreach in your Dripify campaigns.

You may create up to 50 custom lead fields per account:

2. While uploading a CSV file to a campaign:

Custom Lead Fields you create are available as variables in Connection Request, Message, InMail, and Email actions. Custom variables are marked with a “Custom” label, so you can easily distinguish them from default variables.

You can rename a Custom Lead Field in Settings, and the new name will automatically update across all active, paused, and draft campaigns where the field is used.

You can use your own data in outreach by uploading a CSV file. Once the file is added, proceed to the next step — field mapping. Here, you can review the uploaded data and map each CSV column to the corresponding Dripify lead field before importing your leads.

Each Dripify lead field can only be selected once during the column mapping process. The field that has already been used will be grayed out/disabled and cannot be selected again. Also, Dripify detects and pre-selects fields that match each other.

If a field is missing from your CSV file (for example, if it doesn’t contain a LinkedIn email column) or you choose not to map a field, Dripify will retrieve the corresponding value from the lead’s LinkedIn profile.

Importing a CSV file with leads that already exist in Dripify? You can choose one of the three options for what happens to their lead field values:

1) “Update all leads” updates all fields, including the existing values (you’ll confirm this with an “I understand that existing values will be overwritten” checkbox);

2) “Update missing fields only” fills the gaps and never changes the existing data - this is the safe default;

3) “Do not update existing leads” imports new leads only.

If you already have leads' email addresses, you can import them from a CSV and map the corresponding column to the Custom Email field during the CSV upload.

You can map any email column to the Custom email field. When you add a Send Email action to your campaign sequence, Dripify will use the Custom Email address to send email outreach to that lead.

If multiple email addresses are available, Dripify follows a specific priority for selecting which email to send the message to: first, it prioritizes custom emails; next, it uses corporate emails retrieved through the 'Email Finder' feature; and finally, if neither of those options is available, the email will be sent to the LinkedIn email address.

This allows you to utilize email addresses you’ve collected from other sources directly in your Dripify campaigns, alongside emails found by Dripify.

You can also use Custom Lead Fields to send fully personalized Connection Requests, Messages, InMails, and Emails to individual leads within the same campaign.

For example, you can create a “Message” column in your CSV file and add a unique message for each lead. After uploading the CSV to a campaign:

When the campaign runs, Dripify will replace the custom variable with the value from the CSV, so each lead receives the individual message you created for them.

The same approach can be used with Connection Request, InMail, and Email actions, allowing you to run a personalized outreach for each lead in your CSV.
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You can add a full sentence or even a paragraph to a Custom Lead Field value, which is especially useful when importing fully personalized messages for individual leads.

The character limit depends on the action where you use the custom variable. The field value needs to fit within the character limit of the corresponding LinkedIn or Email action.

For example, if you use a custom variable in a Connection Request note, the value must fit within the character limit for a personalized note — 300 characters for Premium LinkedIn accounts. For a Message action, the limit is 5,000 characters; for a Send Email action, it’s 1,000 characters; and for an InMail action, it’s 1,885 characters.

The character limit for cell data in your CSV file is 1,000 characters (including spaces, underscores, hyphens, etc.)

You can view and edit the values of both default and Custom Lead Fields directly on the Lead card in Dripify.

For example, if you’ve uploaded a lead’s custom email and their email address later changes, you don’t need to re-upload the lead. You can simply update the Custom Email value directly on the Lead card. The same applies to any other Custom Lead Field value.