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What are customer records in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement?

Marketing Cloud Engagement has a strong focus on email, so both veterans and new users alike can get turned around when it comes to the framework for customer records in the platform.

We will start by pulling apart and defining the platform’s two customer concepts: Subscribers and Contacts.

Subscribers

Salesforce defines a Subscriber in the help documentation as:

A subscriber is a person who has opted to receive communications from your organization.

The documentation then further details this record contains an email address for the email channel, a phone number for SMS, and so on.

This means a Subscriber is an individual Contact’s record for a specific channel such as email, SMS/MMS, or push. Each record will have a unique Subscriber Key. Subscribers will be written to All Subscribers when they are sent a message. It’s best practice for the Contact Key and Subscriber Key to be the same value.

Contacts

Salesforce defines a Contact in the help documentation as:

A contact in Contact Builder is an individual added to any contact database within your Marketing Cloud instance. A contact is also any other individual to whom you sent a message via any channel using Marketing Cloud.

This means a Contact is an individual’s cross-channel record. Cross-channel means this is the one record for the individual, in any channel — (e.g., both email and SMS). This enables you, and the system, to determine that Bob from a given email subscription is the same Bob from a specific mobile subscription. Each record will have a unique value for a Contact Key.

The important part of the Contact definition is “to whom you sent a message”.Contacts are generally created by the system when a customer is sent a message, (see below for additional methods of creation).

Leading practices for Contacts and Subscribers

Now that we’ve established what Contacts and Subscribers are, we should cover a few important concepts and leading practices as it relates to this data.

Make fiscally responsible choices

Each Contact in the Enterprise, the collection of Business Units, will count toward the account’s allocation. Get in the habit of only storing Contacts that have actionable data. For example, if you have 100 contact records, but only 75 of them have a valid phone number, the remaining 25 records aren’t actionable for your SMS campaigns and as a result should not be stored in Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). SFMC is not a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, therefore all customers and their data should not be stored in the platform. This is a common, and expensive, misuse of SFMC.

Know how and when to add data and create records

Additionally, it is important to know how and when Contact and Subscriber records are added to the Business Unit. Both the add method and the end location matter when it comes to whether or not you are simply storing data or creating Contact and Subscriber records.

Methods of bringing in, or otherwise using, data that either adds a Contact or Subscriber record. NOTE: list is not comprehensive or exhaustive.

You can add data to a Contact in SFMC using several different methods.

• Import a file — CSV or TXT file import to All Contacts
• API calls — there is a REST endpoint to add Contacts
• Marketing Cloud apps —some 3rd party apps can create Contacts
• Synchronized Data Sources (MC Connect) — by default the Leads, Users and Contacts objects will create Contacts when the Synchronized Objects are activated for either of the three objects mentioned. Breaking the MC Connectors sync will not reverse the creation of these Contacts.

Conclusion

You don’t have to be an expert in SFMC or memorize all the concepts explained here, but when key decisions are being made about data integration or data architecture in the account, be sure to follow some basic principles to keep the instance in good health.

1. Make sure your Subscriber Keys are unique to each Contact or Subscriber.
2. Periodically check to be sure there’s not an unexpected influx of Contacts by using the Contact Count Report.
3. Inventory your data sources and scrutinize new ones to ensure data hygiene.

And finally, if you do find issues with current processes, know that there are cleanup methods!