Tips for using the 'External: Basic client email/mobile' field option

The 'External basic client email/mobile' field option is one of two methods used by Glide to determine who the correct recipient is for your email or SMS message, along with the correct email address or mobile phone number. This setting is especially handy when you want a quick setup without the need to link contact and apply tag to those links.

How Glide finds the recipient and the email address/mobile number is explained in this article (option 1). In the video above and the notes below, we discuss two practical examples of when you might choose to use this option.

Scenario 1 - Automation only sends to individuals (e.g. personal tax returns).

When you have a workflow route that is only used by individual clients, as may be the case with personal tax returns, then the basic option can work well.

With personal tax returns, the client is typically the person that you want to receive the message, therefore, there is little benefit to

This method is only for sending emails or SMS messages to one recipient per client at a time, and you cannot use it to send the same message to multiple recipients within the same client. When creating a personalised email or SMS message, you can select the 'Recipient' option within the email editor to add the client's full name, first name, last name, and title if desired.

Example of how Tip 1 can be applied:

Suppose you have a workflow route for Personal Tax Return jobs, and you have all the clients' email addresses filled in. You want to send an email requesting clients who haven't submitted any paperwork to do so. In order to make each email personalised with the recipient's 'First Name', you can use the {Recipient.FirstName} merge field. Since you know that all the clients have their 'First Name' field filled out on their client summary cards, you can use this merge field to pull in the 'First Name' of each Personal Tax client into their respective emails. By doing this, you can ensure that each email is personalised and tailored to the individual client.

Tip Number 2:

For workflow routes that are not solely used by individual clients, consideration should be given to which individual you would want to address within an organisation. Our preferred method is to use contact tagging, (you can read about that here), however in some circumstances, you can achieve this using the basic method.

This is possible where:

• The email/mobile number that you wish to target is stored on the client record (as opposed to a linked record such as a director), in the appropriate fields.
• Each time this automation runs, you will only need a maximum of one message to be sent per client (as opposed to sending multiple messages to different directors).
• You do not need the additional functionality offered by contact tagging such as filtering.

If you choose to use this basic method to send messages to organisations and if you wish to merge in the first name or salutation of the intended recipient, then you need to consider how you will access the first name. Organisation clients on Glide do not have a value in the first name field in the way that individual clients do, therefore you would need to create an additional custom field to hold this value.

Read this article to understand how to create this field. In the example below I have created a 'Main Contact Known as Name' field.

For example, if you wanted to address the company Glide Practice Solutions Limited as 'Ben', you would populate this new field on the client's summary card with 'Ben'. As mentioned above you would need to ensure Ben's email address is in the organisation's main email address field.

For any queries or further assistance, feel free to contact us via the blue 'Questions? Docs + Help' widget.