Contact Management

Overview

Contacts are the foundation of your database. They are the people that you communicate with via messages through channels in your Cordial account. Each contact is represented as a record in your database that is uniquely identified by its primary or secondary identifier keys, which are determined during implementation. Note that your account can use multiple contact identifiers, even custom values you may currently be using across other platforms.

Subscribe status

Contacts can be associated with multiple channels (email, SMS, push, etc.) with each channel containing a subscribe status of either subscribed, unsubscribed or none.

Messages classified as "Promotional" will only be sent to contacts with a subscribe status of "subscribed". 

Transactional classified messages will be sent to any subscribe status. 

This enables you to send transactional messages, like order confirmations and password resets, to contacts even if they are not "subscribed" to your promotional communications. 

How Contacts Are Stored

A contact is stored as a record in the contact collection that contains all data related to that contact. This data can be used when building audiences for segmentation, triggering message sends, personalizing message content and building reports.   

A contact record may contain:

• Channel Association (set by Cordial)
• Email Address
• SMS Number
• Device IDs
• Contact Attributes (added by the client)
• First Name
• Last Name
• Address
• etc.
• List Association (added by the client)
• Cart Items (added by the contact)

Contact record JSON example

Below is a simple example of how a contact is stored in the Cordial database as a JSON object (some data has been omitted for easier viewing). Note how list association and cart items are also part of the contact record.

{
    "channels": {
      "email": {
        "address": "fredgarvin@example.com",
        "subscribeStatus": "subscribed",
        "unsubscribedAt": ""
      }
    },
    "firstName": "Garvin",
    "lastName": "Fred",
    "age": "46",
    "birthday": "2001-05-22T07:00:00+0000",
    "address": {
      "street_address": "555 Truss Ave",
      "postal_code": "92108",
      "country": "United States of America",
      "state": "CA",
      "city": "San Diego",
      "tz": "America/Los_Angeles",
      "loc": {
        "lat": "32.7773",
        "lon": "-117.1008"
      },
      "countryISO": "US",
      "auto": false
    },
    "lists": [
      "newsletter",
      "weekly-specials"
    ]
  }

In the above example, notice the reserved channel attribute that contains the email address, the custom attributes that contain address (a geo attribute), first name, last name, age, birthday, and the lists attribute that contains the contact's list association.

View contact record JSON object from the contact profile page

You can view the JSON object of a contact record using the View as JSON button located on the contact profile page.

View contact record JSON object during message creation

During message creation you can use the Smarty utility JSON Pretty Print to view the contact record in JSON format.

{$utils->jsonPrettyPrint($contact)}

By pasting the above code into the HTML editor and clicking the preview button, you are able to view the specified contact's record with all attributes, list association and cart items (if available).

In the next article learn how to import contacts.