Configure contact properties

With contact profiles in Sitefinity Insight, you get an overview of the background and behavioral data of each contact in the form of scores the contact accumulated and interactions they completed.

When you open a contact profile, on the top you see a predefined set of personal details, which the contact has provided or the system has gathered about the contact, such as email address or name. These are called contact properties. The contact property has a name and contains aliases for mapping to source data properties.

You configure contact properties in Administration » Data center dashboard » Contact properties.

By configuring contact properties, you can:

• See on top of the contact profile the details that you consider most important.
• Add custom properties or reorder contact properties that are always visible on the contact profile.
• Search and filter the contact list by these contact properties and export the resulting list to CSV files.
  For more information, see Sort, search, and export contacts.
• Use the contact properties when you define conversion tracking segments.
  For more information, see Segment visitors.
• Base your marketing workflows on the contact properties you define.
  For example, you can define Persona and Lead scoring rules or implement personalization in Sitefinity CMS.
• Combine data from more than one system into one contact property.

To better understand your contacts, you can create properties using different data types. Sitefinity Insight supports the following data types:

• Text
  Use properties of type string to hold textual information, such as names, job titles, or, for example, IDs used to connect this contact to the corresponding record in another system.
  String properties can be no more than 255 UNICODE characters.
• Number
  Properties of type Number have two sub-types, which you use in different cases.
  • Whole number

    Use properties of type Whole number to store numerical values, such as the contact’s age.
    Whole number properties can hold numbers without a decimal part in the range of -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647.

  • Decimal number

    You use properties of type Decimal number to store decimal number, such as price, rating, or weight. Decimal number types are suitable for storing monetary values.
    Decimal number properties can hold numbers in the range of -999,999,999,999.9999999 to 999,999,999,999.9999999 and can have up to 7 digits of precision after the decimal point.

• Date
  You use properties of type Date to store dates, such as birthdays or dates of events.
  Dates can store values in the range of 01/01/0001 to 12/31/9999.
  
  NOTE: The Date properties store only dates. They do not store information about the time or the time zone.
• Yes/No
  Boolean properties of type Yes/No store one of two values – Yes or No. You can also consider these values as True (Yes) and False (No). You can use them to store information about truthfulness or whether something happened, and so on.
  For example, Subscribed to the newsletter or Accepted TOS.

To see a list of all basic properties and the data mappings they get their data, in your data center Administration dashboard, open the Contact properties tab page.

You use data mapping aliases to relate to data in the source system. For example, the Email address contact property may use data from the Email and Contact fields form data source systems. You use aliases to label and distinguish data coming from different data sources. For example, if you have a CRM and Sitefinity CMS form which both report data as JobTitle, you can create a data alias CRM.JobTitle and Form.JobTitle. Then, you can, for example, set priority as described in Priority of contact properties section below.

You can combine data from multiple data sources into one contact property. In this case, Sitefinity Insight merges the contacts that have the same email address, independently of the data source from where the email fields are reported. Thus, the system considers them as one and the same contact.

When adding new contact properties, you define one or more data mappings which the property gets its value from. Priority specifies the order, in which the system checks these mappings for value. If the mapping with priority 1 has no value, the systems checks the mapping with priority 2 and so on, until there is a mapping with value. The property gets that value.

EXAMPLE: For example, there may be several data source fields that mean one and the same thing in your scenario, so you want to use them to fill just one contact property. For example, the Job Title property may come from your CRM system under the name Position, from your website registration form as Job Title, and from several smaller forms on the website as Job. All these fields need to be considered as Job Title, but with different priority. The Position field is Priority 1, the Job Title field Priority 2. Finally, if there is no value in these fields, the contact property Job Title uses the data from the Job field from the forms.

You can add contact properties to the list of predefined ones, displayed by default, in the contact profile. You do this by adding the properties either from the ones already reported by the data source in this data center or add a new property.

When adding a new property, you first need to implement subject metadata to feed and populate this property with value, otherwise it will be an empty field.
For more information, see Design your automated integration strategy » Transforming the data.

NOTE: You must make sure Sitefinity Insight matches the name of the new property with the data property with which data is passed. For example, if you are passing the date on which users register on your site with a data property named CreationDate, you need to name the new contact property CreationDate, as well.

Regardless of how you add custom contact properties, you can see them in the following screens:

• Contact profiles.
  NOTE: You access contact profiles from Audience » Contacts.
• As filter or search options in the Contacts page.
  For more information, see Sort, search, and export contacts.
• When defining rules for contact segmentation, based on personal data when defining conversions.

  NOTE: Not all contact properties are useful for segmentation purposes because they do not bring business value when creating marketing segments - for example First name or Street address.

To add a new contact property, perform the following:

1. In Sitefinity Insight, click Administration in the upper right corner.
2. Select the data center you want to manage.
3. Click Contact properties.
4. Click Create a contact property.
5. Enter a name of the property that you want displayed in the contact profile.
   For example, enter Job title.
6. Under Data type, choose the type of the property.
   If you choose Number, you can select between Whole and Decimal subtype. For more information, see Contact property types » Number above.
   You can optionally enter any text for Prefix or Suffix. This text will be shown anywhere a value for this property is shown or required to be entered. You can use these to show additional information, such as a specific currency or measurements of the type - for example, km/h.
7. To add an alias for data mapping between the property in the data source and your new property, click Add.
   The Add alias window appears.
8. To create a new alias, click the New tab.
   Alternatively, to select a property, already reported by the data source systems, click Select from reported. To confirm your choice, click Done.
9. To change the priority of the field when using more than one field, use drag-and-drop.

RESULT: The new properties are displayed in the Contact info section of the contact profile.

IMPORTANT: Contact data is recalculated overnight, and you can see the new properties displayed on the next day.

You can change the order that the contact properties are displayed in the contact profile.
To do this, click Reorder and drop each property in the required position in the list.

To edit the name and definition of a property, do one of the following:

• Click the contact property name.
• Click (Actions) » Edit of the respective property.

IMPORTANT: You cannot change the type of property.

NOTE: If you change the priority of fields that the contact property uses, the new prioritization logic is applied to your entire contact base.

To remove a property, click  (Actions) » Delete of the respective property.

NOTE: You cannot delete the contact identifier property – the email of the contact.