While creating your Acoustic Campaign database, you must know your unique identifier. A unique identifier is a field in your database used to distinguish one contact from another, such as email or customer number.
After you implement your unique identifier decision, you cannot modify it. Additionally, Campaign ensures unique contacts by rejecting record imports and updates that are not unique.
Database type | Unique identifier | Details |
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Flexible database | No unique identifier | Required for SMS, mobile app messages, CRM, and strongly recommended for Acoustic Exchange customers. Select your database field(s) that you want to sync by when adding or updating contacts. |
Restricted database | Unique identifier required.
Email is the default. |
Requires that you select a unique identifier(s) now. The field that you select as your unique identifier is required when adding or updating contacts. Typically the unique identifier is an email but can be other fields. |
Flexible database
Flexible databases do not have a unique identifier. This option is often used when the data is managed by an external system such as CRM or some operational data system and the data is pushed to Campaign.
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Restricted database
The default unique identifier for restricted databases is the email field. When an email is the sole unique identifier for the database, all contacts must have a unique value in the email field. Any attempt to add a contact with a duplicate email value (through the Campaign UI, API, or web forms) is not allowed.
When a different field is set as the sole unique identifier for the database, that field must also have a unique value. For example, if you create a custom numeric field labeled Account ID and assign it as the unique identifier, then Account ID value in the database must be unique for each contact, such as 12345 for Contact A and 67891 for Contact B.
Multiple fields may be set as unique identifiers for a database (you can designate up to 10). This can also be performed via API when declaring a field in your mapping file through the <KEY_COLUMN> parameter set as 'true'. In all cases, the values in the string of fields must be unique. For example, if you created a database with three custom fields (Account ID, State, and Store ID) as unique identifiers, the string of field values would look similar to the following:
- Contact A = '12345,GA,SMY'
- Contact B = '6789,GA,SMY'
While no other record can have an exact match with any other record in the database, as long as one field value is unique in the unique identifiers set of fields, the record can exist in the database.
- Campaign's restricted databases unique identifier default is email. But you may have a specific business reason for using another unique identifier.
- If you use SMS, mobile app messages, or CRM, do not use a unique identifier.
- All suppression lists must have email as the sole unique identifier.
- After creating the database, you cannot change unique identifiers.
- Users of CRM integration functionality will need to create a database with no unique identifier present for syncing to CRM.
- Composite unique identifier is a combination of up to six fields from a table or up to 10 fields from a database. For example, you can select multiple columns for relational table inclusion. Together these columns create a composite unique identifier.
- Make sure to consider duplicate prevention and how sending works if choosing a flexible database or restricted database.
Email unique identifier
A contact's email address uniquely identifies the contact record/row in the data. This is the default unique identifier in Campaign and generally the simplest to work with.
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Custom defined unique identifiers
A single field (other than email address), or a combination of fields that might include email address, uniquely identifies rows of data. This unique identifier might better reflect real-world situations or third-party data sources. Custom-defined keys are often account or customer IDs.
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