Feedback loops for profiles

For the past few months, users of the Marketing Suite have been able to set up feedback loops in order to receive real-time notifications whenever an email is opened or a link is clicked. Starting this week, feedback loops are now also available for database profiles. If you install a feedback loop for profile creations, a notification is sent to your server each time a profile or subprofile is created in one of your databases. Similarly, feedback loops for profile updates and profile deletions notify you whenever a profile or subprofile is modified or removed.

These notifications contained detailed information about the change, including the identifier of the profile, the parameters of the change, the time when the change occured and a complete description of the resulting profile. In the case of a profile deletion, it provides the fields and interests that the profile had right before it was deleted.

Switching from database callbacks

Feedback loops are very similar in use to the database callbacks from Publisher. Users that have database callbacks installed are advised to replace them with the new feedback loops. In order to set up feedback loops, you need to switch to the Marketing Suite environment; the feedback loops can then be found on the Configuration page.

Just like database callbacks, feedback loops send HTTP POST calls to a script on your server with relevant information about the profile or subprofile that was changed. The exact format of the incoming messages can be found in the documentation on feedback loops.