Getting Started: People
This document is part of a complete series on Getting Started with Customer.io.
To send effective messages, your system should send relevant data to Customer.io. The data you send for each Person in your account can be used to automatically match them into Segments. This allows you to fine-tune how you target your audiences and gives you the power to personalize their message content.
Profile
All the data about a single Person in Customer.io is collectively known as their profile. A Person’s profile is where you will find their Attributes, Segments, Devices, Drafts, Sent Messages, Activity Log and Journeys. You’ll also see an Options menu in the upper right corner of every People page for common tasks.
We encourage you to send profile Attributes and Events for every Person in your account. If needed, you can also send Page Views and Devices. Below you’ll find a brief explanation of each.
Profile Attributes
Attributes are properties stored, per Person, in your account. You use them for messaging, segmenting, or triggering Date Triggered Campaigns. They are named values you use in various places throughout Customer.io. For example, when building Segments or designing message templates. If you want to customize your messages using data that is unique to each Person, you should store that data as Attributes in their profile.
Avoid storing sensitive information in Customer.io
You should limit the personal data you store to what you’ll use in Customer.io. You should not store sensitive data passwords and other tokens in Customer.io. While we take every effort to protect you and your customers’ data, limiting the data you share outside your backend systems limits potential security concerns and helps you respect your customers’ privacy.
When troubleshooting support tickets, you can grant Customer.io support access to your workspace for a limited time. When you grant access, Customer.io support personnel can see your audience’s attributes and the data you store.
Subscription Preferences
Subscription preferences are a special type of attribute that can be used to control the delivery of your messages. They allow your customers to opt-in or opt-out of specific types of messages. For example, you could allow your customers to opt-in to receive marketing emails, but opt-out of receiving surveys.
Customer.io has a native subscription center you can set up for each of your workspaces. Visit our subscription center documentation to learn more about set up and setting preferences.
Events
Events are actions performed by People. Events and the data you send with them (i.e., Event Attributes) can be used to trigger Campaigns. They can also make People enter or leave Segments. For example, when a Person check out on your site, you can send a “made_purchase” event. That event can trigger a Campaign to send a receipt. It can also cause a person to leave a “Hasn’t made a purchase in 6 months” Segment.
Page Views
Page Views are simply Events (as described above) that have “page” as their type value. If you want to create Segments based on webpages People visit (or don’t visit), you will need to send us Page View data whenever a known user visits your site.
Note, you do not have to send us every Page View they make. We recommend only sending Page Views that you want to use for segmentation in Customer.io. Page View data is automatically sent to Customer.io for any page where our JavaScript snippet is present. However, you can also send Page Views to us via our API.
Devices
Devices are physical objects your People use when interacting with your system. Each Device has a unique id that is required to send mobile push notifications using Customer.io. Once you’ve added a Device via our SDKs or the API, you’ll be able to see it in a Person’s profile. We’ll show the Device’s platform, token and when that Device was last used or most recently identified.
We automatically delete unregistered devices
To prevent invalid tokens from stacking up on people in your workspace, we automatically remove devices when they’re invalidated by push services.
Profile Tabs
As you send data to Customer.io, you will see the information flow into in each of the tabs shown in their profile. Attributes and Devices are explained above. Below is a brief description of the remaining tabs:
- Overview - A truncated view from a handful of the other tabs.
- Segments - Information about which Segments a Person belongs to.
- Drafts - A log of messages that have been drafted for this Person but have not been sent yet. Expand each row for more detail.
- Sent - A log of messages that we have sent or attempted to send for this Person. Expand each row for more detail.
- Activity - A log of activity that has been received for this Person. Expand each row for more detail.
- Journeys - A log of Campaign’s and Broadcasts this Person has entered. The detail for each Journey will show you the Person’s individual trip through a workflow. (Great for troubleshooting your Campaign and Broadcast configuration!)
Objects and relationships
Objects are a new feature that let you group people in your workspace, like accounts that people belong to, flights they’ve booked, or online courses they’ve enrolled in.
Objects have their own attributes, providing a way to relate data to a group of people in your audience. For example, you might message everybody related to an account object to let them know that it’s time for their yearly renewal. Without objects, you’d need to set attributes or send an event for every individual member of the account! But with objects, you can handle this one-to-many relationship the easy way. Learn more about objects and relationships.
bill_date is < 30 days from now|e[Send a broadcastto the account] e-->f[Angela gets
bill due message] e-->g[Oscar gets
bill due message] e-->h[Kevin gets
bill due message]
