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A contact is a recipient profile that belongs to your Dugble team. Contacts give you a durable place to store identity, profile data, and messaging preferences that can be reused across audience workflows.

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Contact identity

Every contact has an email address. A contact can also include a phone number, first and last name, and application-specific properties. When a phone number is provided, Dugble validates it as an international number and stores normalized phone and country information alongside the contact.

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Custom properties

Use custom properties for application-specific data such as plan, customer ID, company, or lifecycle stage. Property keys are defined separately for the team and have a declared type. Dugble validates contact property values against those definitions before storing them.
Updating a contact’s properties replaces the stored property object with the supplied object rather than merging individual keys automatically.
Dugble keeps email unsubscribe state and SMS consent separate because they represent different communication decisions. For SMS, a contact can be unknown, opted_in, or opted_out. Explicit consent states also record a source such as api, import, or manual. For email, the contact’s unsubscribed field represents its general email unsubscribe state. Topic subscriptions add another, more specific preference layer.

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Contacts and audiences

Contacts can:
  • belong to one or more segments,
  • have a subscription state for multiple topics,
  • be excluded from email delivery by suppression rules.
This separation lets you target a segment without treating membership as consent.

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API details

For creating, retrieving, updating, deleting, or listing contacts, see the Contacts section in the API Reference. For defining custom property keys, listing property definitions, changing fallback values, or deleting a definition, see the Contact Properties section in the API Reference.