Best Practice for Selecting a Recipient ID

Setting up the Recipient ID for your Agillic database is quick and easy. However, it's an important decision that will define your recipients. So, take your time and try to map out as much of your data structure as possible before setting it up.

Agillic's Recommended Best Practice for Selecting a Recipient ID

What is a Recipient ID?

As the name implies, a recipient ID is a specific Person Data that identifies individual recipients in the database. Each recipient must have one to be part of the database.

It's technically possible to create a recipient without a Recipient ID, depending on the method used for creating the recipient. However, this isn't recommended as it can produce errors around send-outs, importing data to the recipient, and more.

What Should my Recipient ID Be?

You can set your Recipient ID as any piece of unique Person Data. This means it could be any Person Data that's unique to the recipient, such as:

• Email address
• Customer number (from another system)
• Phone number
• Hashed valued (such as Firstname+Lastname+Birthday)

By default, the Person Data EMAIL is set as the recipient ID. This is a useful way to identify a recipient in a lot of data structures because:

• A recipient would know their own recipient ID
• It's easy to locate based on an email to customer service
• There's no need to generate a recipient ID for new recipients

In some cases, it's not possible or best practice to have 'EMAIL' set as the recipient ID. Reasons for this would typically be:

• Multiple recipients can have the same email address
• Recipients can exist with no email address in Agillic
• The external system has another recipient ID which should also be the Recipient ID in Agillic

If Agillic gets data from an external data centre, recipients might be defined by a customer number or ID. In some cases, this might not even be accessible to the recipient ID, making it harder to look up recipients in Agillic.

When importing all the information from the data centre, you can use any unique Person Data to identify a recipient. This would allow data like a customer ID to be a unique Person Data but still have other data like EMAIL be the actual recipient ID in Agillic.

Unique Person Data

It's possible to have multiple Unique Person Data in Agillic, but only a single recipient ID. Setting selected Person Data as unique allows one to limit the allowed recipients in Agillic. Creating a new recipient will fail or skip if Agillic finds an existing value for the unique Person Data.

It's highly recommended to set the selected Person Data as unique before importing recipients. This will prevent any data clean-up of unique Person Data in Agillic.

Set a Person Data Field as Unique

You can recognise a unique Person Data by a flag icon next to the data name. You can change a Person Data to be unique by selecting the Person Data, opening it, and then check the 'Unique' Checkbox.

It's recommended to always set the Person Data 'EMAIL' and 'MSISDN' as unique Person Data to stop yourself from communicating to the same recipient several times.

A Person Data 'CANDYCLUB_ID' set as unique