How to connect customer data

Engage provides a couple of ways to easily connect your user data.

Direct import

You can directly import your customer data from the user page of the Engage dashboard by uploading a CSV file. Download your users data as a CSV file from your datastore, including all necessary attributes that will be useful for segmentation. These could be gender, date of birth, location, product plan, etc. Upload the file and you can immediately start segmenting your users based on the uploaded attributes.

The direct import is a quick way to get started but there are two drawbacks.

1. You can only import attributes with this method. You cannot use the method to bring in customer event data.

2. The data is not live. Because it is not connected to a source, if there are changes to the data at the source, there is no way to automatically update in Engage. It has to be manually done.

Integrations

Integrations are the easiest way to get your customer data into Engage. Integrations allow you connect services and tools you already use to Engage. These tools are then used to sync and enrich your customer data, power your messaging through Engage or notify you of delivery events. Some of these include Segment, Make, Zapier and Stripe. A list of supported services is available on the Integrations page of the Engage dashboard.

SDKs

Another easy way to bring in user data is to use one of the SDKs. The SDKs allow you add user data, update user attributes and track user events within your application. Even if you have added user data using other methods, the SDK is an easy way to continually update user data from a one time integration.

API

Using the API gives you the best flexibility. One of the biggest advantage of the API over the SDKs is that you can use it to add user data for inactive users and track past events. If you are looking to send your user data to Engage without waiting for an active action from the user to trigger the SDK, the API is the way to go. Once you have used the API to import user data, you can then use the SDK to continually update the user data.