Creating or updating Contacts

You can manually add a Contact in the context of one-on-one customer contact, or edit an existing Contact for example if you want to correct a mistake you find in an individual Contact’s information or simply update the details. You add Contacts in an Address Book, and edit Contacts in an Address Book or Distribution List.

Before you begin

To create or update Contacts, you need Contact Management rights and Write permissions for the Address Book.

About this task

A Contact contains the following information about a person or an organization:

  • General—mailing information such as a Contacts's e-mail address, the format the e-mail should be sent in, the subscription status, e-mail error status, and whether the Contact is active of not
  • Details—specific information about a Contact, such as name, surname, phone number, and so on.
  • Keywords—properties or attributes of a Contact that define a Contact's preferences and interests, such as a preferred brand of car or hobbies. A Contact may have multiple Keywords from one or more Categories. For more information, see Classifying Content and Contacts.

Procedure

  1. Open the Content Manager Explorer.
  2. Navigate to the Publication > Audience Manager node.
  3. Select an Address Book and do one of the following:
    • Click the New Contact icon in the toolbar.
    • Choose New > Contact from the context menu.
  4. To update an existing Contact:
    • Select the Contact, in an Address Book or Distribution List, and choose Open from the context menu (or double-click the item)
    • Use the Contact search functionality, described in see Searching Contacts, in an Address Book or Distribution List locate a Contact.
  5. In the General tab, fill in or modify the Mailing details:
    • E-mail address—the person’s e-mail address
    • E-mail type—the Contact’s preferred e-mail format:
      • HTML—using HTML, you can format the text of your e-mail and include images and clickable links. However, not all of your Contacts may be able to see the HTML-format e-mail. This is the default value.
      • Text—using plain text, you can be sure that the recipient of the e-mail can read the message, but you lose the ability to format your e-mail message.
      • Multi-part—HTML and plain text combined in a multi-part e-mail message. The e-mail client of the recipient determines which format the recipient will see.
    • Subscription status—indicates the status of a Contact's subscription:
      • Opted-in—the Contact registered as a subscriber and confirmed the registration.
      • Subscribed—the Contact registered as a subscriber, but did not yet confirm the registration.
      • Unsubscribed—the Contact would not like to receive e-mail.
    • E-mail error status—indicates whether problems have been encountered sending e-mails to the Contact:
      • No problems—e-mails sent to this Contact should arrive without incident.
      • Temporary problems—e-mails sent to this Contact have encountered temporary problems, for example, the Contact’s e-mail Inbox was full.
      • Persistent problems—e-mails sent to this Contact have encountered permanent problems, for example the e-mail address of the Contact does not exist.
    • Active—clear this check box to prevent this Contact from receiving e-mails.
  6. In the Details tab, fill in or modify the Contact's extended details.
  7. In the Categories and Keywords tab, add or remove a Contact’s Keywords:
    1. Click Add.
    2. Browse to and select a Keyword.
    3. Click Insert.
    4. Repeat the procedure to add more Keywords.
    5. Click Close when you have finished adding Keywords.
    6. To remove a Keyword, select it click the Remove button.
  8. Click Save and Close.

Results

You have created or updated a Contact.

What to do next

In the E-mail tab, you can view Mailing statistics for the Contact. For more information, see Viewing Contact e-mails.