News Marketing Cloud: Guest Types and Traits 101

If you’re new to the Insight portal or just don’t feel confident yet to build a query from scratch, Guest Types and Traits can help. Often referred to simply as Traits, these are pre-built queries that automatically run in the background. Traits are built by your Account Manager using a predefined set of parameters, provided by you, to easily use within your queries.

Traits eliminate the challenge of determining which data table to use, identifying the parameters to include or exclude, and testing the query for accuracy. It’s basically a way to save a set of parameters that you may often use within a query, that can then be incorporated into another query. Traits live in the Traits table within Insight, and sync as Data Fields each night to your Acoustic email platform.

The customization possibilities for configuring a Guest Type or Trait are endless. Guest Types are Yes/No fields, whereas Traits have non-binary values. Examples of Traits include arrival date, departure date, purchase date, event date, or other types of behavior, such as the name of a pass product that was purchased or property name of the lodging destination.

Traits are a powerful feature within Insight and many Inntopia partners use Traits for all of their querying. However, if you understand the basics of the underlying data tables that are used to build traits, you can build your own table queries to use in place of, or alongside, your prebuilt Traits.

As always, don’t hesitate to contact Inntopia Support or your Account Manager for more tips or with any questions.

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