Introduction

Tracking user (contact) data is useful to learn more about your users, and makes possible sending targeted emails. For example, you can track when user was last seen, how many todos completed (if todos app) or the favourite color. You can track anything, really. The more you know about your user, the better you can target them with specific emails.

What data you should track?

To get your some ideas for what data you could track about your users:

  • Generic – name, company, website, registration date

  • Payment – plan type, trial expiration date, billing interval, next billing date, customer lifetime value

  • Activity – last seen date; your application specifics, if todos app: todos created, todos archived, last todo created at date, onboarding completed date

Setting up contact properties

Create contact (user) properties

Before you can track any user data, you need to tell Sidemail what data should expect. Head over to your project settings and find the Contact properties section. There, you can create and edit properties that you track about your users.

Supported data types:

Naming convention

You can name contact properties in whatever naming convention you prefer. For example, this how you could name full name property:

  • fullName
  • FullName
  • full_name
  • Full name

Example

Push contact data to Sidemail via create or update contact method using the Node.js library.

const configureSidemail = require("sidemail");
const sidemail = configureSidemail({ apiKey: "xxxxx" });
  
const response = await sidemail.contacts.createOrUpdate({
	emailAddress: "john.doe@example.com",
	identifier: "123", // ID representing the user in your database
	customProps: {
		fullName: "John doe",
		pricingPlan: "premium",
		registeredAt: "2019-08-15T13:20:39.160Z",
		lastSeenAt: "2019-08-20T17:40:39.160Z",
		// ... more of your contact data ...
	},
});