Manage contacts
Contacts represent individual people and are the primary customer entity in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys. When you run a customer journey, your target segment will include only contact records. When you create a lead, you will relate that lead to a contact record. Other Dynamics 365 apps might treat these entities somewhat differently, instead focusing more on accounts or using leads that aren't related to any contact.
Typically, your contacts will represent customers or potential customers, but you might also include partners or suppliers among your contacts, especially for events where you'll also typically include speakers, vendors, and sponsors in your contact database.
To view, create, or edit a contact, go to Outbound marketing > Customers > Contacts. This path brings to you a standard list view, which you can use to search, sort, filter, create, and delete your contacts. Open any contact to view its details.
A variety of attributes are supplied on the contact record, including on the Summary and Details tabs. However, you can define additional attributes as needed by your organization. Keep in mind that the information that you capture for all your contacts can help you build segments to tailor your marketing communications to.
The contacts entity is common for and shared by most Dynamics 365 apps for the Microsoft Dataverse platform, but Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys adds several enhancements to it. These attributes can be found on the Details tab of the contact record:
Marketing information - This section shows which marketing initiatives were responsible for generating the contact.
Contact preferences - This section shows how the contact prefers to be (or not to be) contacted by your organization.
Important settings in this section for Marketing include Bulk Email, which controls whether Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys is permitted to send marketing email messages from customer journeys to this contact. When Bulk Email is set to Do not allow, no commercial marketing email messages will be sent. Contacts can adjust this setting by using a subscription center.
Email - This setting is part of the standard contact entity (it isn't added specifically for Marketing). It controls whether any Dynamics 365 app (including Marketing) can send any type of email to this contact, including commercial and transactional messages. For more information, see Set the legal designation to identify each message as either commercial or transactional.
Prefill marketing form - Controls whether Dynamics 365 Marketing is permitted to prefill form information (such as name and email) on marketing pages for this contact. When this form is set to Do not allow, all marketing pages will present an empty form to this contact, even when the contact is recognized by the system. Contacts can set this option by selecting the Remember me check box on any marketing page that is set up to include the prefill feature.
Subscription lists - The contact Details tab includes a section called Subscription lists, where you can see a list of each email subscription that the contact has signed up for in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys. For more information, see Set up subscription lists and subscription centers.
For more information, see Use contacts to manage customer people.