What are contacts in Userorbit?
Contacts are the people who interact with your product. Every visitor, trial user, and paying customer can become a contact in Userorbit. Understanding how contacts work is foundational to targeting the right people with the right messages at the right time.
Types of contacts
Userorbit recognizes three types of contacts, each representing a different stage of identification:
Anonymous visitors
When someone visits your site or app with the Userorbit script installed, they are tracked as an anonymous visitor. Userorbit assigns a random identifier and begins recording pageviews, sessions, and events. Anonymous visitors are useful for understanding traffic patterns and triggering messages based on behavior alone, such as showing a welcome banner to first-time visitors.
Identified users
Once a visitor signs up or logs in and you call the Userorbit identify method with a unique user ID, the anonymous visitor is promoted to an identified user. All prior anonymous activity is merged into the identified profile. Identified users carry properties like name, email, and any custom attributes you pass in.
Subscribers
Subscribers are contacts who have opted in to receive messages through a specific channel, such as email or in-app notifications. A contact becomes a subscriber when they provide explicit consent or when your application marks them as subscribed via the API.
How contact data flows into Userorbit
Contact data enters Userorbit through several paths:
- Userorbit script — Automatically captures anonymous visits and identified sessions from your website or app.
- REST API — Create or update contacts programmatically by sending properties and events to the Userorbit API.
- CSV import — Bulk-import contacts with properties from a spreadsheet.
- Integrations — Sync contacts from tools like Segment, your CRM, or Zapier workflows.
How contacts power targeting and personalization
Once contact data is in Userorbit, you can use it across the platform:
- Segments — Group contacts by shared properties or behaviors, such as "Enterprise plan users who signed up in the last 30 days."
- Event-based targeting — Trigger messages when a contact performs a specific action, like completing onboarding or visiting a pricing page.
- URL-based targeting — Show content only to contacts viewing a particular page.
- Personalization — Insert contact properties like first name or company into message copy so every interaction feels relevant.
Key takeaways
Contacts are the central building block of Userorbit. The richer your contact data, the more precisely you can target and personalize. Start by installing the script to capture anonymous visitors, then layer in identification and custom properties as users move through your product.