Every organization is unique, and which data is needed to drive a powerful marketing operation therefor vary from organization to organization. At the center of most marketing activities is the Contact model, holding personal information and contact details for your contacts. Out-of-the-box the Contact model provide a range of general attributes - name, contact information, etc. that covers a lot of ground. However, to make the most of your marketing efforts, your organization may want to import additional attributes, not covered by the general attributes - this is where custom attributes come in handy.
Custom attributes are additional attributes that your organization wants to save on a Contact to make segmentation and filtering even more customized to your needs - it may be a membership renewal date, a loyalty program level, or any other data point that is important to you.
You can extend your data model with additional custom attributes at any time, and they will be immediately available for filtering in the MarketHype application. To enable us to provide you with appropriate filter options and validate and properly index your data, all custom attributes need to be defined in advance, before you can import any data using those attributes.
The Contact model holds personal data and contact information for a single contact in your database. When extending the Contact model with custom attributes, try to focus on attributes that somehow describe that person:
Before you can import data including your custom attribute, you need to define the attribute. By defining the attribute in advance, we can validate your data on import, index it for filtering and provide relevant filtering options in the application depending on what type of data your attribute holds.
Custom attributes can be defined on the Contact model. To define an attribute you need to define key label and type.
The key is a unique identifier for your custom attribute. The key is used to map your imported data to the right attribute.
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WARNING
The same key cannot be used twice on your model and cannot be changed in the future.
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The label is used in the MarketHype filter tool to describe your custom attribute. Use a label that describe the attribute and make sense to your marketing organization. You can update the label of a custom attribute at any time.
The type specifies the data type you intend to store as the custom attribute. Custom attributes currently support five different types - string number boolean date and list. When you import data for your custom attribute we will validate the incoming data against the data type and ignore data that cannot be mapped to the defined type.
The type will also impact what kind of filters are available in the application for the given custom attribute. A custom attribute of type number will have range filters (greater than / less than), which will not be available for a custom attribute of type boolean, to give an example.
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WARNING
The type of the custom attribute cannot be changed in the future.
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