Profiles

🌟 Update 06/2024: this page has been updated multiple times since our initial launch on July 2023 to reflect ongoing enhancements brought to Profiles — Since then, we also released a dedicated Profiles API.

Profiles: a new way to visualize your users on the Batch platform 👥

Running relevant marketing automation at scale across millions of users is one of the modern marketer’s biggest challenges.

There are 3 reasons why managing users is so difficult:

1. Users are constantly logging in or out across multiple devices,
2. Users are continually giving or withdrawing consent to be contacted across marketing channels such as Email, SMS or Mobile Push,
3. Users are generating tons of data across the various platforms they're using to interact with your service (e.g: web, mobile, offline).

At Batch, our customers know that a unified, real time view of their customers is the key to taking this challenge head on.

Meet Profiles: the new way to visualize your users on the Batch Platform.

What makes Profiles different?

Before learning more about Profiles, let’s review 4 key differentiators:

1. Omnichannel. Batch has the capacity to gather user data from everywhere in order to build an identity-level, online/offline, exhaustive picture of your users.

2. Real-time. Thanks to Batch’s modern data activation capabilities such as SDKs & APIs, Profiles are updated by the second, reflecting advanced real-time data capabilities, unlocking a new world of in-the-moment use-cases for marketers.

3. Persistent. Batch Profiles are engineered to map user lifecycles seamlessly, supporting Anonymous Sessions or Logged In Users indifferently, adapting to users constantly logging in and out of a service and/or switching across devices.

4. Privacy By Design. Because Batch Profiles manage user data at such a granular level, it makes it easy for both users to withdraw consent and for our customers to execute GDPR-like compliance requests. (Learn more about GDPR Compliance here.)

Profiles structure

Profiles are computed thanks to Batch’s modern data activation stack, SDKs, APIs & MarTech Integrations.

Those capabilities let our customers pull and unify user data across all data sources into one single customer view.

For example:

1. Batch SDKs will collect live data directly from your apps and websites,
2. Batch APIs will enable real time sync with your back-end infrastructure (e.g: internal system of record),
3. Batch MarTech Integrations will pull data from whatever data warehouse (e.g: Snowflake, BigQuery) and/or CDP (e.g: Segment, mParticle) you might be using,

These actions are performed during Batch’s initial onboarding with the help of our Solutions Engineering team.

(Learn more about our implementation methodology and best-practices here.)

Profiles View

Once this initial set-up is done, Batch will start computing Profiles.

Profiles can be visualized on the Batch Dashboard by going to the Profiles View page.

(Dashboard → Settings → Profiles).

On this page, you can search for any user using different identifiers such as Email address, Custom ID or Installation ID.

(To learn more about this part, see: How to find a user's profile in the Profiles section?).

Overview

Once you’ve found a specific user, you’ll see that the Profiles View page has a lot to offer:

• User Summary: either the user’s identity when logged-in or a Profile ID when anonymous, along with language, timezone and last visit date information.
• Subscription Preferences: channels for which the user has given consent such as Transactional and Marketing Email/SMS and Android/iOS Push Notifications.
• Platforms: devices on which the user has been identified (e.g: iOS, Android, Web).
• Attributes: all attributes linked to the user.
• Events: all front-end and back-end events linked to the user's lifecycle.

User Summary

If the user is a Logged In User, then User Summary will look like this:

If the user is an Anonymous Session, then User Summary will look like this:

Anonymous Session Vs. Logged In User: What’s going on here?

Let's take a quick step back here to understand what it means for marketers.

Profiles was designed with user management challenges in mind, with users possibly logging in and out of your service at any time, or opting for anonymous browsing—hence the two alternate stages of being either an Anonymous Session or a Logged In User.

To help marketers meet those challenges, we’ve built Profiles so that whenever a user moves from being an Anonymous Session session to a Logged-in User (or back), Batch will sync the user’s entire anonymous browsing history into its Profiles.

Additionally, Profiles will handle user log-out in a similarly practical way.

If a user logs out from one or more devices, those devices will be disconnected from their Profiles and any data tracked via these devices will be attached to a new, separate Profile allowing users to keep browsing anonymously (Anonymous Session).

If the user logs back in at some point, data can be merged back into the user’s Profiles (Logged In User) with Batch’s Custom ID as a sync key.

For marketers, this set of capabilities proves to be extremely practical and a prime reason to chose Batch to handle user data management at scale.

Subscription Preferences & Platforms

The Profile View will then display the state of user subscriptions to one or multiple channels such as Email, SMS and Mobile Push, along with the platform they’re using to interact with your service such as iOS, Android or Web.

Attributes

Reminder: Attributes are pieces of data you know about a person.

The Profile View will display two types of attributes:

• Native attributes: data collection for those attributes such as email address, phone number, subscription preferences, timezone or language have been normalized.
• Custom attributes: customers have total control over data collection for those attributes which can take the form of strings, numbers, floats or arrays and reflect any business-specific attributes they wish.

Events

Reminder: Events reflect a user’s ongoing and historical activity.

The Profile View will display a live feed of events such as actions they’ve taken, pages they’ve visited, items they’ve favorited or attributes of their profile that changed.

What’s next?

If you’ve read thus far, bravo—you just got a sneak peek of what a modern, omnichannel, unified view of a customer looks like 🎉

But this is just the beginning.

You can now start executing advanced CRM strategies by leveraging real time user data into Automations and Campaigns—Batch’s 1:1 and 1:many orchestration components—and any channel you’d like to use such as Email, SMS, Mobile Push, Web Push, In-App Messaging or Inbox.

Browse Case Studies to discover how leading brands take advantage of Batch’s Customer Engagement Platform.

Plans & Pricing

Profiles are available for all customers of our Customer Engagement Platform.

Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact us to get started.