Custom template variables plug-in – Linked Helper

General information
Use case
Detailed description
How To

General information

Custom template variables is a plug-in that extends message template editor with user-defined variables, for example {cs_my_tracking_url} or {cs_translated_firstname}.

To enable it please:

Navigate to the Plug-in Store menu.
Find Custom variables plug-in and click Install button:
Once plug-in is installed, Custom variables button can be found in CRM or Queue list of any campaign:

Use case

Many of our clients from different countries prefer to send messages using their native language, yet most of the leads they collect have profiles in the English language. In such a case, using two different languages in one message would seem strange. Using custom variables and this instruction, you can add {cs_firstname} custom variable that contains already translated names which will be used instead of built-in variables that take English names from profile pages.

Detailed description

With "Message Template Editor PRO" you can create appealing, deeply personalized messages using such features as variables, and IF | THEN | ELSE operators. However, sometimes using standard LinkedIn variables such as 'position', 'company', 'mutual contact' is not enough to customize your automated message when you want to refer to a very specific piece of information. Exactly for this purpose Linked Helper allows uploading custom fields (or custom variables as others call them). For this to work Linked Helper needs a file with 2 columns - profile_url and a column with your custom field.

There are 3 levels of custom fields where you can upload this file:

CRM level
Campaign level
Action level

In this section we overview only campaign level. Basically, custom variables uploaded to a campaign level are applied to the current campaign only. If you'd like to apply custom variables to all campaigns, upload them to CRM level.

If you'd like to know how to upload custom variables to another levels, check the links above.

What you need to do first is to:

Download profiles from a campaign for which you want to apply custom fields

Open the file with MS Excel or Google Sheets (Note: Unfortunately, MS Excel doesn’t support CSV files in the same way as .xslx files. But you are still able to open any CSV file with MS Excel. Please check here how to do that).
Add custom fields and save the file. The name of the column with the custom field has to start with "cs_" for Linked Helper to recognize it. As an example in the screenshot below, we added 3 new custom fields - cs_event, cs_year, cs_where (Note: you do not need to keep other columns except profile_url, so you can either delete the rest columns leaving only profile_url and your custom fields or just add custom fields as new columns)

Navigate back to the campaign Queue listand click on "Custom fields" button:

Select the file with your custom fields and click on "Upload"

Now if you navigate to the "Message" tab for any action in any campaign, you will see that this custom field is available. Please keep in mind, that it will work only with profiles whose URLs were uploaded with the file: