What is Carma OriginalID?
Carma Original ID is the key factor for how a recipient is managed on a list in Carma. Each unique Original ID is one unique recipient.
Original ID needs to be decided when setting up a new account in Carma and then be consistent for your recipients over time.
You select the value you want to use as Original ID. This could be a customer number, an email address or something else that identifies a unique contact.
But how to choose? Well, take a look on how you identify your contacts in i.e. your CRM (or other databases), could you use the same ID for the recipients in Carma? Using the same identifier in all system can make it easier for you to synchronize the data between the systems.
Some of the data and activities connected to the original id are:
- Contact data (i.e. email address, mobile number, city, date of birth, membership level)
- Purchase history (i.e. order or event rows)
- Message history (all contact interaction in i.e. emails or microsites in Carma)
- Unsubscribe
- Web interaction
- Carma Survey answers
Also, the Original ID is the key value for activating or inactivating recipients on your list with imports.
And it is crucial to use the correct Original ID when you want to update recipient data.
The importance of Original ID when updating your Carma database
You actually only need one column in your import file to complete a recipient import in Carma and that is the Original ID (but of course, you’ll probably want to include more data to dress your contacts). Without the ID you can’t import your file.
If you later on want to update these recipients with more data that i.e. update their address, reflects their purchase history, or other business related behavior, you use the contact specific ID to update the correct recipient.
Let’s exemplify this:
Below you see a mockup file with columns headers explaining the content.
If you import below file to a Carma list, you will get a list with two recipients. These recipients have the same email addresses (and will get one email each).
This is due to that they have different Original ID values:
| originalId | firstName | lastName | emailAddress |
| bruce@example.com | Bruce | Springsteen | bruce@example.com |
| 123456 | Boss | Springsteen | bruce@example.com |
If the file would have looked like below instead, the list would only contain one recipient with email address bruce@example.com and first name Boss.
This is because Carma will import the file from top to bottom and first add the first row of data. Then look at the list and find an original ID match and update the recipient with original ID 123456 with the values on the second row. The last name and email address will stay unchanged while first name will be updated to Boss.
In other words, the second Original ID will update the first in this list.
| originalId | firstName | lastName | emailAddress |
| 123456 | Bruce | Springsteen | bruce@example.com |
| 123456 | Boss | Springsteen | bruce@example.com |
If you after this want to make an additional import you can add more data into other fields on the Carma list.
Simply make sure you have the OriginalID column together with the rest of the file data:
| originalId | ShoeSize | MembershipLevel | Bonus |
| 123456 | 43 | silver | yes |
PLEASE NOTE that the Original ID value is case sensitive so if you import below three Original ID’s:
bruce@example.com
Bruce@example.com
BRUCE@EXAMPLE.COM
They will be added as three unique rows in the recipient list in Carma.