Contact Types

Contact Types allow you to classify your contacts based on the context or purpose of their communication. By assigning specific contact types, such as "Home email," "Work email," "Home phone," or "Work phone," you can easily differentiate and organize your customer contacts according to their respective roles and usage as determined by the individual.

The Name and Description fields on all Contact Types support localization which helps you configure them in any language to support multilingual customer experiences.

Preferences on a profile are always associated with a Type. Types are broadly classified into two categories:

Contact Element Types

As the name suggests, contact element types are used for associating contacts for a specific communications channel, specifically Email, Phone, SMS, and Mail.

Let's consider the example of email. Clients can define distinct email types, such as "Work," "Home," and "Emergency." By doing so, users can assign specific email addresses to each type and also store preferences or associate consents accordingly.

Clients can define consent settings for each email type, indicating whether they allow or disallow certain types of communication or data sharing. For instance, a user may grant consent for work-related emails to be shared with colleagues within the company but restrict the sharing of personal emails with third parties.

Identity Types

Identity Types or Id Types include CustomerTypes, AlternateId Types, and Group Types.

Customer Types are used to classify profiles based on the type of customer. For example, a contact can be classified as a Customer or a Prospect. It is a required data element on every profile. Preferences which are stored on a profile that are not connected to a contact element type are stored using the customer type.

Alternate ID Types are used for associating additional identifiers that help you uniquely identify a profile across other systems. For example, customer identifiers from other applications such as Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook can be stored as Alternate Ids. Alternate ID values are unique by Alternate ID Type across all profiles.