The core of marketing automation is getting the right message to the right people at the right time. This article is a deep dive into contacts in Campaign Studio, including how to add contacts to your instance and what you can do and see on each contact record.
Quick Add is a short form with the fields you deem most important. To display fields in the Quick Add form, make them available on short forms in the custom fields configuration.
This form of manual addition displays all published contact fields when creating a new contact.
Campaign Studio creates a new contact if a person submits a form and no existing contacts in the instance have the unique identifier the person used on the form submission. Typically, Campaign Studio uses the email address as the unique identifier, but it’s possible to change the unique identifier.
If a person submits a form using a unique identifier for an existing contact, the existing contact record updates with any new information from the form.
Campaign Studio has several plugins available. See Plugins directory for help in setting up the plugins you will use.
The flexible, API-first architecture of Campaign Studio enables users to add new contacts through the API from virtually any source, if the source has an open REST API. To use the API, you must enable it in Settings > Configuration > API Settings and add your application in Settings > API Credentials. See our developer documentation for help.
Campaign Studio accepts CSV files up to 1 GB encoded in the UTF-8 format. When importing a CSV, you can import up to five files in parallel.
Note
If a user attempts to import more than five files at a time, the additional files enter a ‘delayed’ state. To resolve this, unpublish the files in delayed status import(s) and republish them after the import of one of the files is complete. It ensures that more than five files are not running at a time.
To import your CSV file:
Create custom fields in Campaign Studio to match the fields in your list.
Set up users with contact permissions if you want to assign contact ownership
If you want to add the contacts to a segment, create the segment. All you need for the segment is a title and to set it as published.
Be sure to clean your data:
Once you’ve completed those steps, you’re ready to import.
In the menu next to Quick Add, click Import.
Choose your UTF-8 encoded CSV file.
Adjust Delimiter, Enclosure, and Escape if necessary. The default
settings are comma (,), quotation mark ('), and forward slash
(/).
Select Contact Owner, Contact Segment, and the desired Tags. These fields are optional.
Map the fields in your CSV file to the fields you want your data saved to in Campaign Studio.
Map Company name to the Company name field under Primary Company, not the contact’s Company field.
Note
If the column header in the CSV matches the Alias of any of your Campaign Studio fields, the system maps those columns and fields.
CSV contact imports support matching by Contact ID.
Note
Users can choose to not overwrite fields if a value already exists in the field on a contact record.
Click Import.
At any time, you may review the import history to see what files you’ve uploaded, how long it took, the number of contacts
You may also review the history to see when the import took place.
You can click the values in the Total Rows, Inserted, and Updated columns to view the contacts belonging to each category.
Campaign Studio supports exporting contact lists in CSV and Excel formats.
Export to CSV - Sends a downloadable link containing the CSV file of the contact list to the email address on your Campaign Studio user profile.
Note
This feature currently supports the export of a maximum of one million contacts.
After clicking the link in the email, users are redirected to the instance login page. Users must login as the same authoriazed user that the email was sent to and the file downloads after loging in. Once the file has been downloaded, users can share the file with other non-Campaign Studio users.
Export to Excel - Exports contact lists to Excel directly from the system.
Information Tabs: Campaign Studio enables organization of custom fields into Core, Social, Personal, and Professional. Edit the individual fields in Settings > Custom Fields to change which fields display in which tab. Tabs which don’t have any fields assigned won’t display.
Sidebar: Sidebar displays key information, including the image, points, stage, contact owner, address, email, address, phone numbers, upcoming events (scheduled campaign events), associated companies, segments, and tags. To change a contact’s primary company, click the yellow checkmark on the company you want to assign as the primary company. You may collapse the image by clicking the arrow in the top right corner of the image.
Gravatar: By default, Campaign Studio pulls images from Gravatar. If there’s a Gravatar associated with the contact’s email address, Campaign Studio will add the Gravatar photo to the contact record.
Custom: To add a custom image file to a contact, edit the contact record and look for Preferred profile image under the image placeholder.
Social: If you’ve enabled social plugins and the record includes a social profile, you’ll see options to pull in profile images.
The engagements and points graph shows the last 6 completed months with how many events are on the contact’s activity history, and the change in points for each month.
Event history tracks any engagements between Campaign Studio and a contact. To find certain event types, search in the Include events by source text box. To exclude event types from the history while you’re looking at it, use Exclude events by source.
Accessed from IP: IP addresses which the contact has opened or clicked emails, visited your tracked pages, etc. from.
Added through API: Contact was created through API.
Asset Downloaded: Lists which assets have been downloaded from your pages or website. Combining this information with other data can help with analyzing what led a contact to download the asset.
Campaign Action Triggered: Actions within campaigns which have already happened.
Campaign Event Scheduled: Actions within campaigns which take place in the future. Expand the details to see the event’s scheduled date and time. Click the clock icon to reschedule the event, or click X to cancel the event. A warning icon means an execution error on the first try caused the event to be rescheduled.
Campaign Membership Change: Changes to which campaign a contact is a part of.
Contact Created: This is the first event, showing the date and time the contact first entered your database (either as a known or anonymous contact).
Contact Created By Source: How the contact was created
Contact Identified: The date and time the contact was identified, moving the contact from an anonymous to a known contact.
Contact Identified By Source: How the contact became identified.
Do Not Contact: The date and time the contact unsubscribed from your messaging on a particular channel.
Dynamic Content sent: A dynamic content slot is pushed to a contact through a campaign action.
Email Failed: If an email is sent to an invalid or undeliverable email address, it will be recorded as an email failed event (with the internal name of the email shown).
Email Read: The date and time when a specific email was first read. If the contact opens the email multiple times, expanding details on the event type will display the additional opens.
Note
To avoid performance issues, a limit of up to 1,000 Email Read event details is displayed.
Email Replied: If a contact replies to an email sent through Campaign Studio, thecreply displays on the contact record with this event type. To see this, you must have the Contact Replies inbox configured in Settings > Configuration > Email Settings.
Email Sent: When a specific email is sent to a contact, the internal name of the email and the time & date of that send are listed.
Form Submitted: Along with showing the name and time and date of the form submission, expanding the details on this event type shows the data collected on the form and what page the form was submitted on (referrer).
Imported: Dates, times, and file names for all CSV imports that included a contact.
Integration Sync Notice: Information about connections with integrations.
Message Queue: If a contact’s frequency limits for a channel have been reached and a message on that channel triggers to send, a Message Queue event displays with the channel and the ID for the message being queued. Expanding details displays:
If the message is Pending, clicking the X button cancels it.
Page Hit: Time and date of page visits, and the URL if it’s a tracked page on your site or the internal name of a Campaign Studio landing page. You may view more information, if tracked, by expanding the details of this event type.
Point Gained: The ID number of either:
Segment Membership Change: When contacts are added or removed from segments by any method, those changes display in the event history.
Stage Changed: If you are using Stages in Campaign Studio (not stages as a custom field), changes to those stages will display in the event history
Text Message Received: This event type is for SMS replies, if you are using
SMS and have SMS reply tracking configured. Outbound SMS display as Campaign
Event Scheduled or Campaign Action Triggered.
UTM Tags Recorded: If you’re using UTM tags and record them from a form submission, landing page hit, etc., they will be listed here. Expanding the details displays the recorded tags.
Video View Event: Details in this event type include the length of time a prospect watched the video, the percentage of the video watched, the page where the video displays (Referrer), and the URL of the video file.
Some plugins contain specific events. The events display and are searchable after the plugin is connected.
Users may have a CRM system where they store notes about users. Campaign Studio can also store notes about individual contacts.
If the contact exists in other tools and is connected through plugin or API integration, you’ll see those here. This helps identify where a contact came from, or what other internal systems the contact exists in.
When a field changes on a contact record, Campaign Studio tracks the change in the audit log along with who (or what) made those changes. Old values and new values both display, in case you must find old information about a contact.
Note
Campaign actions, form submit actions, and point triggers are considered system updates.
This option enables users to send an individual email, either manually created with the builder or from a template email. The From Name and From Email Address default to the user sending the individual message.
Note
Template emails sent using this feature don’t display in reports.
This option enables users to manually add or remove contacts from campaigns. Click the Campaign ID to be directed to the Campaign page.
If you’ve identified duplicate contacts, you can merge them together by searching for the contact you’d like to merge with. This keeps the values of the record you’re merging into. If a field is empty on one record but populated on the other, Campaign Studio will populate the field in the merge.
Channels: To manually unsubscribe or subscribe/re-subscribe a contact to a channel, set the individual’s frequency preferences (overriding the instance default), set a Vacation period (break from communications), or change the preferred channel (default for messages sent in campaigns using the Marketing Messages feature).
Categories: If you’re using categories, contacts can choose (on their preference center) which categories they receive messages for. This option enables users to manually update those preferences.
Segments: Users can manually add or remove contacts from segments.
There are several operators and commands to help you find contacts which meet a certain criteria. To see the full list in your instance, click the question mark next to the Filter box.
Note
Contacts can be searched by a custom field. Use the following format for your search:
<Field alias>:<The value you want to search for>
For example, to search for a contact whose first name is Jane, use:
firstname:jane
The search must use the field alias and the value. Labels for either one do not return results.
To make updates to several contacts at once, select those contacts then click the green arrow at the top of the checkbox column.
If you’d like to see your contacts in the card view, click the C button while you’re looking at the contact list. To go back to the table or list view, press the T key.
What you see: Switching to the anonymous contacts view displays the IP addresses for visitors to pages tracked with your Campaign Studio tracking code. If you have an IP lookup service configured in Settings > System Settings > Miscellaneous Settings, you will also see an approximate location of these contacts. Campaign Studio uses MaxMind Geolite2 City by default. The location is based on the contact’s Internet Service Provider, and may not be the exact location of the contact.
Individual contacts: Click an IP address to display a contact record, similar to known contacts. If there’s any information on an anonymous contact, you can see it here. This data can include:
Note
53 State Street, 10th Floor
Boston, MA 02109
United States
Phone: 888-922-7842
Social¶
If a contact record includes social profiles, you can see them in the Social tab. You must have the respective profiles set up in Settings > Plugins.