Contacts, attributes and segments

The CDP is the single contact record every channel writes to. One person with a phone number, an Instagram handle and an email address is one record, not three.

What a record holds

• Identifiers — phone, email, social IDs, external CRM ID.
• Attributes — typed fields you define: plan, market, language, lifecycle stage.
• Events — conversations, campaign sends, form submissions, device pings.
• Consent — per-channel and per-purpose, with source and timestamp.

Segments

Segments are saved filters over attributes, events and consent. They evaluate at run time, so a segment used by a campaign always reflects the current state of the data.

Keep it clean

Define attributes deliberately and document what each means. An undocumented free-text attribute becomes unusable within a quarter.