Working with customer lists and data sources
You can use the Customer Data management features to create and populate customer data and define your target audience (in terms of profile and behavior).
Key concepts
List
A primary list of customer records. All Filters, Custom Tables, and Profile Extensions are associated with a List. (Also known as a Contacts List or Profile List.)
Profile Extension
Profile Extensions give you a way to store additional attributes that define behavioral, demographic, or profile preference characteristics of your contacts. Using Profile Extensions helps you organize contact information in a most efficient way for your queries and data imports.
Unlike Custom Tables, which store unaggregated information about recipients, a Profile Extension holds aggregated data.
For example, if you want a contact’s purchase information, a Profile Extension contains only the name of the most recent item or last purchase date, while a Custom Table includes data for every purchase.
Custom table
Additional data used to augment the essential data contained in the List.
Filter
Provides a way to target a set of records in a List, based on criteria you specify.
Data source
Data sources include Lists, Profile Extensions, and Custom Tables.
Audience
A set of contacts who meet a variety of conditions based on selected filters.
Accessing Customer data
Use the Manage Customer Data page to review and edit Lists, Filters, Profile Extensions, and Custom Tables.
To open the Manage Customer Data page, do one of the following:
- Click Data at the top of any page
- Click
and select Manage Customer Data from the Data menu
Considerations for creating data sources
Consider the following questions when creating and defining your lists and data sources.
- How many lists do you need? Generally, one list (always your primary customer database) is sufficient for defining and customizing all your data needs.
- Do you need custom fields in addition to the standard list fields? If you do, create Profile Extensions for the list.
- Is there a 1:1 relationship between the List data and the other data? Use a Profile Extension for the other data. Is there a 1:many relationship between the List data and the other data? Use a Custom Table for the other data.
Uploading and managing data
Use any of the following options to create and update your records.
- Create lists by loading data from delimited text files.
- Using Connect with scheduled file transfers.
- Create Profile Extensions and Custom Tables either by uploading a file or manually specifying fields.