A contact is a business object describing a natural person who interacts with your company, for example, through a website, social media, or email. Contacts can be classified by the following business relationships to your company:

• Suspect: A potential customer whose interests are unknown.

• Consumer: A person who has purchased something from your company as a private person.

• Contact Person (corporate contact): The representative of a corporate account who has interacted with your company.

Technically, the three entities (suspect, consumer, contact person) are the same business object (a contact) in SAP Marketing Cloud. 

Communication Medium
(for example: e-mail, call, or direct push message)

Contact ID
(for example: jane.doe@example.com , +44-20-7946-0930, or @twitterusername)

Communication Category (Subscription Topic)

This permission attribute is used to identify the topic to which the contact subscribed to.

When the permission is tied to a communication category, this special kind of permission is called a  subscription  in SAP Marketing Cloud.

In case no communication category is assigned to the outbound permission, it is called a  general marketing permission .

SAP Marketing Cloud allows you to use both subscriptions and general marketing permission in combination, giving you greater flexibility in managing your communication.

Lite Account

Created when a site visitor completes a non-authenticated, Lite Registration flow. The information they contain is merged into email accounts, for a cohesive view of the user.

Full Account

Created when a site visitor completes the full registration flow (regardless of whether or not the account is pending verification). These users can register with a social identity, or create a password for your site. Either way, they are authenticated users. In the context of Lite Registration, full account data is merged into the corresponding email account, every time an accounts.setAccountInfo call is made for that account. Note that a fully registered user can complete the lite registration flow like any other site visitor.

Email Account

Provides a view of users that is based on their identifier, merging data from both lite registration and fully registered accounts. Note that data is merged from full accounts or lite registrations into this email accounts and not vice versa, with the exception of subscription data that is shared in real time between account types. An email-based view is enabled only when Lite Registration or Subscription Management are enabled in your SAP Customer Data Cloud site.

Subscriptions Object

* Available only with Enterprise Preference Manager

Stores subscription data for a designated mailing list. The data stored for each subscription includes the subscription status of the subscribed user (true/false), a timestamp for the status change, and custom tags. Note that subscription data is the only type of data shared between all accounts. Therefore, you can retrieve subscription data of fully registered users and of lite registrations.

Single vs Double Opt-In : Each communication channel can be configured to require double opt-in i.e. ask users to confirm via email that they do, indeed, wish to subscribe. Below is the list of subscription statuses:

• Not confirmed
• Pending Double Opt-In
• Confirmed

Preference object

Stores consent data for the associated Lite or Full account. Three types of consent can be stored in a Preference object:

• Terms of Service: This is typically a consent to transfer the contact data to SAP Marketing Cloud for storage and processing
• Privacy Policy
• Other Consent: This would be used to store the general marketing permission to communicate on a specific channel (email, phone, sms, ...)

The data stored here includes the consent status isConsentGranted (true/false), and a timestamp for the status change lastConsentModified and custom tags. There is also docVersion which manages the version of the legal statement.
Note that the consent is not shared between the Lite Account & Full Account