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Public preview feature
This feature is in Public preview and therefore subject to short notice changes and improvements. If you have any feedback, share this with your Customer Success representative; we value your input.

By default, Dotdigital has three system identifiers that you can use to manage your contacts:

Contact ID - A numerical, system-generated identifier assigned to each contact at the time they’re created.
Email - Contact email address.
Mobile number - Contact mobile number in E.164 format .

Custom identifiers allow you to add your own identifiers to your account, and use them to manage your contact data. Custom IDs help you to identify and track unique people across all the systems that you use to store your data, as well as to unify data from multiple sources.

For example, you might want to use:

CRM ID
Shopper number
Profile ID

You can use custom IDs in the same way that you can use the system identifiers; to create, retrieve, update, and delete your contacts.

Before you start

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Things you need to know

Email address, mobile number, and custom IDs must be unique values, and cannot be shared across multiple contacts.

A contact can have multiple custom IDs, but can only have one email and one mobile number.

It’s not currently possible to create a contact in Dotdigital identified only by a custom ID. Each contact must also have an email address, mobile number, or both.

Custom ID names have a limit of 50 characters, and custom ID values have a limit of 256 characters.

Support for custom IDs in our ecommerce and CRM connectors is planned, and work is underway. You can leave feedback about connector support and use cases with your Customer Success representative.

Set up custom identifiers

The API calls in this section provide a programmatic way to get, create and delete custom identifiers, but they can also be setup manually.

Learn how in our Help Centre article.