Use cases for one-to-many and many-to-many relationships in Contact Builder

Question

Someone recently asked me why a one-to-many relationship exists in Contact Builder. And I think that's a very good question (also why there is a many-to-many relationship too). The ability to create these types or relationships has existed since Contact Builder was introduced, over five years ago.

The contact model (in Contact Builder) is pretty much exclusively used by Journey Builder (except for some internal platform purposes, like mapping relationships between the Contact Record to email Subscribers, mobile Contacts, etc).

If I have a one-to-many cardinal relationship to a 'Products' Attribute Set in Data Designer, and there is a single product record for the Contact, and I use that Attribute in a Journey Builder Decision Split Activity, then the Contact is routed through the correct branch:

However, if I update the Product DE (which is the linked Attribute Set in Data Designer) to include the following fields for a given Contact:

Id,Product
0031N00001IyHRiQAN,Banana
0031N00001IyHRiQAN,Apple
0031N00001IyHRiQAN,Carrot

Then when I inject the Contact back into the journey multiple times, they are routed through the first branch in the journey each time:

This behavior is understandable, as there is no concept of a one-to-many relationship in Journey Builder Activities.

However, this does beg the question: why can you create one-to-many relationships in the first place? There's no Marketing Cloud application that supports one-to-many (or even many-to-many) contact model relationships that I'm aware of.

Data Designer includes a library of impressive looking Attribute Groups for different use cases, like this one for 'Travel Bookings':

But I'm can't figure out how anyone is able to actually use this Attribute Group, or any one/many-to-many relationship in the contact model. Can you?

Update

Gortonington suggested in a comment that this might work if there are multiple conditions on a filter criteria. I've tested that, where my Product Attribute Set still contains the three records listed above (see earlier code block).

I created an additional branch in my journey for all products, where the filter criteria is:

Product equals Banana and Product equals Apple and Product equals Carrot

However, the Contact is still routed through the first branch, so that doesn't work.

Answer 1

I've asked around some Salesforce contacts to try and get to the bottom of this. One-to-many relationships from Contact Builder are only applicable in Audience Builder (as Audience Builder uses these relationships).

However you can view this relationship data against the Contact in All Contacts. For example, here is the Attributes page for the Contact in my question:

Here you can see the multiple records related to that Contact in the linked Attribute Set. I can't really see how this would be useful (as you need to open each individual Contact in Contact Builder to see this data) and this data relationship can't be used elsewhere.

I'm concerned that users would make assumptions that these many-type relationships actually serve a purpose in Journey Builder.

Answer 2

Have you tried setting this up to run in series, rather than parallel?

As someone mentioned in another answer, Decision Splits act like CASE statements; the first criteria met by the subscriber will be the path they get sent down. You can't send a customer down multiple paths without having them re-enter the journey, and if they keep meeting the criteria they'll keep going down the same path. That's logical.

If your use case is to send a subscriber a comms piece for every one of a given set of Products, then try setting it up as a series of Decision Splits, where a Product entry triggers a comms piece, and people who don't meet the criteria go to a Join that bypasses that comms item and moves on to the next Decision Split.

You can split/nest Product types in some fun ways within Decisions Splits to avoid sending specific combinations, or managing priorities, or whatever else you want to do.

Also, if you want to use a parallel model and don't want people to go down the same path every time, look into using an Update Contact step and a Journey History DE to manage this. It's simple, effective and very extensible, and gives you a useful history record to boot.

We do something similar to what you've outlined, and have not had any problems using a 1:M model to manage a multitude of tasks withing one central Journey.

Cheers

Answer 3

Old and interesting post.

Isn't that what Attribute to Attribute Comparaisons are made for ?

Depending on how your contacts are injected, you may have to insert an extra condition like journey(fruit_id) = contact(fruit_id) to get the intended split.

Anyway, your post brings to the light how misleading this can be for marketers trying to execute a simple segmentation.

F.

Answer 4

A little late to the party, but I agree with Ray.

I have contacts that attend different events and here I see a possible use case for this one-to-many relationship by setting a filter on my entry data extension that chooses only contacts that attended event X.

Doesn't solve the issue from OP with wrong routing in his journey, just offering a use case for one-to-many.