Hi community,
complete newbie here, please be patient… 
So, some time ago I opted for Email Octopus as my emailing platform. The’ve got a good free plan. Now I decided that I’d like to take my email campaigns to the next level, replacing the “Dear all recipients of this email” with a “Dear actual name of the person receiving this email” opening. My mailing list contains roughly 50% of English speaking contacts, and 50% of Czech speaking contacts. When I send out a campaign, it goes out in 2 versions - English, and Czech. Each contact has either an “english” or “czech” tag.
Czech is a tricky language, so before a personalized email can be sent, both the “Dear” and the “First name” need to be processed. (There is a different dear for men and women, plus the name has to be translated into a vocative).
For the Czech name processing there is a service called Skloňování Jmen. There are apps for both Email Octopus and Skloňování Jmen in Make.
I created a test list and I managed to set up an EO module to watch contacts on a that list. It then sends names to SJ and seems to get the proper result. It then gets sent back to EO and populates a custom filed associated with each contact.
So far, so good.
Now, problems begin when I try to set up a filter between the fist EO module and the SJ module. I need to filter for tags and custom fields. I need to filter out only contacts tagged “czech” for processing, and I also need to filter out contacts with the “salutation” custom field already populated from previous processing. However, any tags as well as custom fields are missing from the filter condition settings. It only offers First Name, Last Name, and a bunch of other parameters that I don’t need to filter right now.
How can I set up the filter to filter according to tags and custom fields?
Appreciate any help!
Hello,
It sounds like what’s happening is that EO “watch contacts” module doesn’t expose a tag and custom-field parameters directly to the filter tool in make.
What I think is a good workaround is to create a simple custom field in EO (for example:”language_group”) that stores values like english, czech_male, czech_female, etc. you can populate this field automatically when you first process the contact or when you sync with Sklonovani Jmen. (Rather then a tag in EO).
Or if you need to use the existing tags you could insert a “get a list” module and I believe that would be able to fetch the full contact object, which would have the filter on it. Let me know if this works!
Hi Adrian,
thanks for chiming in.
As you yourself noted, the EO “watch contacts” module apparently doesn’t expose tag and custom-field parameters directly to the filter tool in make. Your first suggestion (to use a custom field instead of a tag) seems to run straight into this very limitation.
As to your second suggestion, I tried to insert a EO Get List module in between the EO watch contacts module and the Sklonovani Jmen module, and set up a filter. While I couldn’t achieve any direct result with this method, somehow after deleting the EO Get List module the new filter remained in place, and it now shows the “language” custom field. This is good.
While I don’t know why this happened, maybe it could work for other custom fields as well… 
Another problem that I don’t understand is that the EO Watch Contacts module seems to remember those contacts from a list that it recently processed, even though I am not aware of instructing it to do so, or set up any parameters for this. Even if I changed the first names of the contacts on the list, or even changed the email address, it still refuses to process them a second time. How do I repeatedly test-run the scenario, apart from creating a fresh contact list or a fresh scenario for each test?
So the Language custom field shown in the filter is not actually a real value. When I test-run the scenario with Language custom field set as condition in the filter, it throws a bunch of errors and the Language custom field gets greyed out. So this is not a way forward.
I got the following advice from Make support, but despite experimenting for a couple more hours, I don’t really know how to make it work.
Hi Roman,
Thanks for reaching out!
Hope you’re doing well! This is Rishabh from Customer Care Team to assist you further.
I understand your concern, and it appears that the app might be using version 1.5 of the EmailOctopus API, which could be why you’re seeing those unexpected fields in the response.
As a workaround, may I kindly suggest using the Make an API Call module with version 1.6 of the API as per the official documentation, as outlined below. Since I see you have only one list, you can hardcode the list ID and map the Contact ID field accordingly. This approach should return the expected fields, including the tag array.
Endpoint: 1.6/lists/ec78b68c-0d1d-11ef-8649-7b0dfa0d12c0/contacts/{{1.id}}
