Marketing Cloud and Person Account

Topics

• Understand what a Person Account is in Salesforce
• Choose an object to synchronize through Marketing Cloud Connect
• Choose fields to trigger a Journey in Journey Builder, Marketing Cloud

Person Accounts

In Salesforce, Business Accounts are the companies that you’ve sold to, while the people who work at your accounts are Business Contacts. You can simply call them Account and Contact because Salesforce focuses on the B2B market. In a traditional B2B business environment, all contacts are placed under an account record. So you can create an Account without a Contact, while a Contact without an Account is not acceptable. (Learn More)

Business Contact in Lightning Experience ©Trailhead

However, what if you have consumers who are individuals, not companies? It’s common in the B2C market because a company promotes its products and services to single customers instead of selling to organizations. In this case, you need a different record type that can store personal information (like a Contact) without a dependency (like an Account). In Salesforce, it is called a Person Account. (Learn More)

Person Account is a record type that can store information about individual people by combining specific account fields and contact fields into a single record. So the following points are worth noting when you work with Person Accounts.

Create, Read, Update, and Delete

• You can create a Person Account record from Account object, using the record type, “Person Account.” The name of record type can differ per your setting
• You cannot create a Person Account record from Contact object, because a Contact record requires an Account records to be linked, and only Business Account records are available for linking
• You can read, update, and delete a Person Account record both from Account object and Contact object. But if you click the Person Account record from Contact object, you’ll be redirected to the Account object
• It has two IDs — One for Account which starts with 001, and another for Contact object which starts with 003
• While you can easily find Account ID, the Person Contact ID doesn’t show by default. To find out Account ID, click the record and check the URL of the detail page — it comes after the object name
  https://{mydomain}.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Account/{AccountID}

Fields

• It has default Account fields such as Account Number, Account Source, or Annual Revenue. By default, the field name is the same as the field label without spaces, like AccountNumber, AccountSource, or AnnualRevenue
• It has default Contact fields such as birthdate, email, or mobile phone. All fields start with “person,” like PersonBirthdate, PersonEmail, or PersonMobilePhone
• If you create a custom field in Account object, a custom field with the ending __c would be created, like Account.Sample__c.
• If you create a custom field in Contact object, it will create a pair of fields: Contact.Sample__c and Account.Sample__pc. In a Person Account record, both fields always have the same value.
• You cannot delete a field with the ending __pc from Account object — You need to go to Contact and delete the field with the ending __c. This action would delete both Contact.Sample__c and Account.Sample__pc at once.

Choose Objects to Synchronize

In the B2C business environment, it’s common to use Person Account (with Person Contact) to store customer information. However, sometimes you need Business Account and Business Contacts as well. Whatever your case is, the following statements would be beneficial for you.

• If you use Person Account only, you can stop to synchronize Contact object while letting Account be synchronized when all fields are available in Account including PersonContactID. Because synchronized person accounts are not automatically added to the All Contacts, you can have better control of your billable contact count. (Learn more)
• In the same context, if you’re considering both B2C and B2B marketing, you can limit the number of synchronized contacts by using a filter. Create a boolean field to check if a Contact record is to be synchronized or not. Use the field as a flag when you configure synchronization.

Note
When you synchronize objects at first, Contact object should be synchronized prior to Account object and keeping them be synchronized is the default option.

Choose Fields to Trigger a Journey

You can use Salesforce Campaign or Salesforce Data as an Entry Source in Journey Builder. Both entry sources create a data extension when you save a journey, so you don’t have to create an extra data extension.

Salesforce Campaign

When it comes to Salesforce Campaign, you can add campaign members in different ways. All those campaigns can be an Entry Source in Journey Builder, and Contact ID or Lead ID would be a contact key in Marketing Cloud.

• Add Campaign Members from Standard and Custom Reports (Learn More)
• Add Individual Leads, Contacts, or Person Accounts to Campaigns (Learn More)
• Add Multiple Contacts and Leads to Campaigns from a Campaign (Learn More)
• Add Multiple Members to a Campaign from a List View (Learn More)
• Import Campaign Members (Learn More)

Salesforce Data

However, when it comes to Salesforce Data, it’s a little bit tricky. In short, you can choose a Person Account, a Business Contact, or a Business Account to trigger a journey in Marketing Cloud. (Learn More)

Note: Those steps below can differ from the official document because Marketing Cloud has been updated later than the document was.

1. Go to Journey Builder | Create New Journey | Build a Multi-Step Journey
2. Drag Salesforce Data under the Entry Sources to the canvas
3. Click the Salesforce Data icon
4. Select Salesforce Data as a new entry source
5. Choose a Sales or Service Cloud object for the entry event source

• For a Person Account, select Account | Person Contact ID (Contact)
• For a Business Contact, select Contact | Person Contact ID (Contact)
• For a Business Account, select Account | Owner ID (User)
  * This can be applied to all objects without the Lead/Contact ID field

After selecting the entry source, you can select fields from the target object (in Step 2. Entry Criteria) or related objects (in Step 3. Filter Criteria). Please note that you need to set Account.isPersonAccount = False as a filter to target Business Contacts or Business Accounts only.

Also, if you’re targeting Business Accounts, don’t forget to add Account.Email__c field to the entry data in Step 4. Entry Data. Note that the sample field ends with __c. Because there is no Email field in Account object by default, you need to create a custom field first and use that field to send an email. The field name can differ based on your org environment.

Once the configuration is done, save the journey so that the system can create a data extension for the entry event. The data extension name starts with the journey name and ends with the timestamp. So if you hadn’t set the name of the journey, it would look like New Journey — July 5 2020 633 PM — 2020–07–05T035523577.

Using the given data extension, you can set the Default Email Address. Select “Use Email Address from Entry Source” and choose the proper field.

• For Person Account, it would be “Account.PersonEmail” in general
• In other cases, use “Contact.Email” or “Account.Email__c” instead

Wrap-Up

Person Account is one of the key concepts in Salesforce, and maybe the most important object you need to sleep on when you’re planning to benefit from Sales/Service Cloud in the B2C industry.

Thank you for reading this article. All comments or corrections would be appreciated.