Understanding unified contacts

Unified contacts allows contacts to have multiple communication channel identifiers stored against it, as well as any data you need to store. A unified contact can be created with either an email address, mobile number or both.

How to reference a contact

When you create a contact in Dotdigital we pass back a unique, immutable contactId which you should retain in your system. This contactId is the most reliable way to refer to a contact, because it doesn’t change. This allows you to update any other identifiers associated with the contact.

Our contacts service offers a flexible method of referencing a contact. You can refer to a contact using anyone of the following identifiers but you must specify which one you are using in the API call to match on:

• Contact ID
• Email
• Mobile number

Channel subscription behavior

Dotdigital is designed for CXDP functionality and therefore allows the updating of contact data independent of any channels status, as no assumptions are made on how or why you are storing the contacts data.

This means that we do allow a contact's data fields to be updated even where they are suppressed, without the necessity of changing the contact's channel status(es) - we do not reject any updates because they are suppressed. Updating a suppressed contact will succeed and the contacts channel statuses will remain unchanged unless otherwise stated in the update.

Using lists with contacts

Address books are now lists

To align with wider industry terminology, and to reflect the greater variety of data you can store, address books have been renamed to lists. The functionality for lists is identical to the way you are used to working with address books. Any of your existing address books are automatically available as lists, with the same names and unique numeric ids.

Adding contacts to lists

You need to use the Contacts API to add contacts to lists; we recommend using Import a single contact for individual updates and Import contact collection for bulk operations. The lists field can be used to specify up to 100 list ids to add a contact to.

Finding contacts in lists and segments

Since Dotdigital adopted unified contacts that can be identified using any associated identifier, such as email, mobile number, contact id etc..., it is important to use the Contacts API for interacting with any contacts. You should use the Get contacts based on your criteria call with the ~listId filter to find contacts in a list, and the ~segmentId can be used for segments.

Finding modified contacts in a list or segment

We recommend using the Get contacts based on your criteria with the ~modified filter used in conjunction with either the ~listId filter or the ~segmentId to find contacts modified after a specific date-time in a list or segment.