in Engage, contact types are often used to categorize customers based on the consent they've given and how much information you have about them. Subscribing to a newsletter, for example, may not require any more data than a email address. However, always make sure you have a strategy in place for converting subscribers to loyal members.

Engage can handle several types of contacts in parallel. This is to track many pieces of information along the migration from an unknown web user with its cookie ID to becoming a paying customer. For this, Engage uses a strict unique data model for each step that needs to be managed in the system. Typically, these are the two major contact types:

• Contact: Mainly used for email lists such as newsletter subscribers or prospects imported from some event. Typically, the data model for this contact type only uses email, or perhaps some demographic data such as a zip code.
• Member (or Customer): Often configured with the richest data model, where the person has given consent to share more information than an email address. As customers climb up the relationship steps, getting more benefits, they can also be requested to submit more information about themselves.

The contact type is always visible on the contact card. Each type can have its own set of contact attributes and its own key attribute.

When manually importing contacts, you need to specify which contact type they should be assigned.

If you need to change the contact type, it can be done manually by selecting another type on the contact card, or via the API.

To simplify data management and support better targeting, Voyado recommends using a single contact type (typically Member). Rather than managing multiple contact types like Contact and Member, differences in customer lifecycle stages (e.g., Prospect vs. Customer) should be handled through segmentation using fields like consent or custom attributes. This setup is easier to maintain and is also needed for activating reward points loyalty features like reward points, which require the Member contact type.

Article last reviewed 06 October 2025 06:37