Contact Builder in Marketing Cloud Engagement

The Contact Builder app provides access to contact data contained within your account and the relationships designed to help you use that data. Use Contact Builder to manage, consolidate, organize, and link data from all Marketing Cloud Engagement apps and external sources.

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
• Point-Of-Sale (POS) systems

Contact Builder provides a single view of a customer that displays their interactions with your brand. You can use the collected information to personalize customer conversations at any size in any channel. That single view of the customer can contain the mobile number necessary to send SMS messages, the email address to send email messages, and the mobile device identification used for sending push messages. All associated address, subscription, and tracking information associated with activities and journeys relate back to that single contact record.

Contact Builder provides several tools used to manage contact data for use in building 1:1 relationships.

• Contacts Configuration—Determine how Contact Builder processes imported contact information.
• Data Designer—Define information about your contacts and relate that data directly to the contact record by linking data extensions.
• Data Extensions—Create and manage the data extensions that hold contact information.
• Imports—Create the processes that move contact information into your data extensions.
• Data Sources—Visualize where your contact data originates and assign attributes to those sources.

• Get Started with Contact Builder
  New accounts include Contacts and Contact Builder. Account administrators with existing accounts can opt to replace their current data structure with the new Contacts structure. After switching to the Contacts structure, your account can’t return to the previous data structure.
• All Contacts in Contact Builder
  Reference information for the All Contacts screen in Contact Builder
• Contact Builder Data Sources
  Data sources in Contact Builder indicate where your account stores and locates contact attributes. To determine the origin of the attribute values that you use to filter and segment contacts, use data sources in Marketing Cloud Engagement. When you know the origin, you can use the most recent and effective data to connect your attribute groups for your communication activities. For example, you can tag customer purchasing data as arriving from an outside source. Other users acting on this data can then identify the custom data source and use the most up-to-date data in your activities.
• Contact Builder Events
  Events in Contact Builder allow you to take contact behavior into account as you segment and filter your audience. Use this information to begin marketing processes and activities within your account, including Journey Builder. The events collect data based on what actions your contact performs or occurrences involving your contact. You can target that behavior and modify your communications to better target that contact. For example, you can find out which contacts abandoned shopping carts and contact them to complete their order.
• Data Extensions in Contact Builder
  Data extensions in Contact Builder form the basis of contact information in Marketing Cloud Engagement. By creating and linking data extensions, you can access information about contacts and use that information to segment, filter, and target contacts with relevant sends. You can also use this data to target contacts across multiple channels, such as email, social, and mobile messaging. Finally, you can use data extensions to hold information imported from external sources and use that information as part of your segmenting, filtering, and targeting activities.
• Contact Builder Imports
  The Imports tab in Contact Builder displays a complete list of the import definitions within your account. Use import definitions to bring data linked to your contacts into your account.
• Data Designer in Contact Builder
  The Data Designer tool in Contact Builder defines, organizes, and relates information to contacts within your account. All contact information resides on subscriber lists and data extensions contained in Marketing Cloud Engagement. Data Designer enables you to manage how data extensions store that information and how those data extensions relate to each other.
• Contacts Analytics in Contact Builder
  Contacts Analytics shows the status of your contact delete requests via either the Marketing Cloud Engagement Contact Builder app or your REST API calls. Use this dashboard to view four separate types of contact delete statistics. Use this dashboard in your top-level account.
• Enable Contact Events in Contact Builder
  Enabling Contact Events in Marketing Cloud Engagement requires admin permissions. It’s scheduled for feature retirement, and we recommend that you filter or query activities in Automation Studio.
• Contact Definition and Count Determination in Contact Builder
  A contact in Contact Builder is an individual added to any contact database in Marketing Cloud Engagement. A contact can be someone who received a message from any Engagement tool, such as GroupConnect, Journey Builder, MobileConnect, or MobilePush.
• Contact Builder Best Practices
  Contact Builder helps you maintain the contact information you use to identify individual contacts across multiple channels and personalize messaging and marketing activities. To ensure that your marketing activities work the way you want them to, make sure that all contact information relates to a single contact record.