Listrak's NextGen Platform consolidates customer data from multiple channels into a single database for data unification, identity resolution, analyzation and activation.
Marketers and customer experience teams can use the NextGen Platform to ingest customer data from relevant channels, and devices, including message engagement, product details, sales, revenue and more to provide a single, unified view of their contacts “unified contact profile”. Furthermore, marketers can act on this data by creating cross channel segments within the NextGen Platform, then apply them to any enabled channel in their Listrak account.
Glossary
Company: Top level entity representing a client's account in the platform.
Organization: The secondary level, representing a brand, within a company's hierarchical structure. Contacts are owned by an organization and all of their data, including purchase data, is centralized to that organization, except for their channel subscription statuses which are tied to the domain.
If a company's account contains multiple organizations, no data (e.g. contact lists or analytics) is shared across other organizations within the account.
Domain: This is the merchant that belongs to an organization which is then associated to a company; a domain can only be tied to one organization within an account. A contact's channel subscription status is tied to the domain. Each domain represents a site a contact can visit.
List: A subscription list is where subscribed contacts of a specific channel are contained, a contact's email preferences are also managed at this level. Lists are also used to manage contacts due to compliance regulations.
Contact: An identified user that is a part of an organization.
All Contacts: This is the overall count of how many contacts belong to an organization, regardless of subscription status or channel.
⚠️ Contacts removed due to compliance requests will no longer display in the list of contacts.
Total Points of Contact: The total number of individual identifiers in a messaging channel that you will see within the Segment count on the Segment Management page. This is NOT a mutually exclusive number as a single contact could have multiple channel identifiers and be subscribed to a channel using all identifiers. For example:
Scenario 1: Listrak is able to identify that Jon Smith subscribed to the email channel using two different email addresses - jsmith@gmail and jsmith@yahoo. When a segment was created both those email addresses fit the criteria, so Jon (a single person) has been identified as 2 emails, making him count as 2 towards the total.
Scenario 2: Listrak is able to identify that Kay Baker subscribed to the email channel using two different email addresses - [email protected] and [email protected] and she subscribed to the SMS channel using the phone number 555-555-1212. When a segment was created both email addresses and her phone number (SMS activity) fit the criteria, so Kay (a single person) has been identified as having 2 emails and 1 phone number, making her count as 3 towards the total.
Reachable Contacts: Contacts that have at least one channel we could potentially contact them through. Subscriptions status IS NOT considered when counting the number of reachable contacts.
Marketable Contacts: The number of reachable contacts that are currently subscribed to a channel. Marketable contact counts are presented consistently throughout the platform and can be seen in the Segment Management area as well as the Audience Builder's Segment count.
Filter Criteria: Individual criteria that a contact would have to meet to be included in a segment. Multiple filtered criteria can be used to define a segment.
Segment: A subset of your total contacts based on common characteristics regardless of channel or opt-in status. A segment can be saved for reuse.
Audience: Also known as a reachable audience, is the number of marketable contacts that can be reached based on their eligibility of each inclusive or exclusive segment and opt-in subscription to the specific channel. Audiences are built within the various channel authoring experiences.
Subscribed/Opt-In: The compliance-enforced consent of a contact to receive messaging.
Contact Management: This page is where all contacts can be found regardless of subscription status or channel. This unified profile management also gives you the ability to segment on multi-channels using the same segmentation too.
Contact Profile: This tab contains contact profile and demographic information, activity and behavior data, revenue and purchase data, product affinity, segment membership and subscription statuses for each contact (Listrak Identifier) in the account.
Segment Manager: This tab provides a list of the segments associated with your organization. Similar to contact management, changing the domain selector to a new organization will result in this list being updated and selecting a new domain within the same organization would result in the counts being updated.
Overview of how the NextGen Platform works
Identifying Contacts
Listrak uses deterministic identity resolution matching, which is the process of determining a contact's identity through first-party data, to identify a contact that enters the Listrak system for the first time. At that time, a new Listrak Identifier will be created and will be the main identifier for the contact. Once a contact subscribes to a channel, a channel identifier (aka point of contact) is also created; each Listrak Identifier can contain multiple channel identifiers. Listrak will also be able to identify multiple channel identifiers and will tie them to the Listrak ID. Contact identifiers can be an email address, a phone number, mobile app push identifier, web browser push identifier or an external identifier.
Listrak Identifier Example Scenarios:
An email address enters the system via a bulk import. The email address does not yet exist for the organization. A Listrak Identifier is then created and the email address is associated to the Listrak Identifier.
A phone number and an email address enter into the system for the first time via account creation on a client's domain. Because the email address and the phone number were associated to the same session, the phone number and email address will be associated to the same Listrak Identifier.
An email address enters the system via a popup on a client's domain. A Listrak Identifier is created and the email address is associated to that Listrak Identifier. After a period of time, a different email address is observed utilizing the same session. Both email addresses would be associated to the same Listrak Identifier with the most recent email address being used for messaging.
Organizing Contacts
Company Structure
Each company (Listrak account) will consist of at least one organization (brand) and each organization is required to have at least one domain. A company could also have multiple organizations and each organization can have multiple domains, see chart below for details.
Example of a Company Structure:
💡Organizations with multiple domains
Changing between different domains within the same organization will NOT impact on the overall count of contacts available.
Segment counts could vary based on the selected merchant because the criteria selected may require a subscription status for consideration, in some scenarios.
Channel and Contact Structure
Each channel (Email, SMS, Web Push, App Push) is required to maintain it’s own subscription status (which is associated with the domain) because each channel has it’s own identifiers as well as compliance concerns. For example, the Email channel requires an email address and then there are compliance regulations such as CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL, CCPA, etc. Whereas the SMS channel, requires a mobile number, support for multiple short codes and the compliance concerns are difference from those in other channels.
A contact and the data associated with them is owned by an organization, however their subscription statuses are managed at the domain level by each channel. The benefit of having the data stored at the organization level is that is it centralized and can be used across multiple channels, when applicable.
Example of a Channel/Contact Structure:
💡Helpful Tips for Organizations with Multiple Domains
Changing between different domains within the same organization will NOT impact the overall count of contacts available.
Segment counts could vary based on the selected domain because the criteria selected may require a subscription status for consideration, in some scenarios. See the Channel and Contact Structure section for details.
Understanding Email Subscription Statuses
A contact may be subscribed to multiple types of email subscription lists and over the course of time they may choose to unsubscribe from one or all lists, see the examples below to understand how the email subscription status is determined. For example:
If a contact is subscribed to receive both marketing messages and abandonment messages from the Organization, their status will be subscribed.
If a contact has opted out of from abandonment messages, but still receives marketing messages from the Organization, their status will be subscribed.
If a contact has opted out of all email communication from the Organization, their status will be unsubscribed.
📑 Additional Resources
Check out the Guide to using Journey Hub in the NextGen Platform to give you a better insight into how the NextGen Platform works with automated campaigns.