Key Concepts
Before diving deeper, here are the core concepts that power Score CRM.
Organizations
An organization is the top-level entity in Score CRM. Each organization has its own isolated environment with separate customers, campaigns, SMTP connections, and team members. Score CRM is multi-tenant — multiple organizations can run on the same instance without data overlap.
Customers
Customers are the people you send emails to. Each customer is identified by their email address and can have attributes like name, city, country, a numeric score, and unlimited custom fields. Score CRM is designed to handle millions of customer records per organization.
Lists
A list is a static collection of customers. You create lists by uploading CSV files. A single customer can belong to multiple lists. Lists are the primary way to organize your contacts before targeting them in campaigns.
Segments
A segment is a dynamic, rule-based filter that identifies customers matching specific criteria. Unlike lists (which are static), segments are evaluated in real-time at query time. You can segment by:
- Attributes: Customer fields like city, country, score, or custom fields
- Events: Email engagement like "opened campaign X in the last 7 days"
- Nested logic: Combine conditions with AND/OR groups
Segments are never materialized — they are evaluated in real-time directly against your customer data.
Campaigns
A campaign is a single email send to a targeted audience. Campaigns have:
- Content: The email HTML, subject line, and sender details
- Targets: A combination of lists and segments (include or exclude)
- SMTP Configuration: Which email provider(s) to use
- Scheduling: Send immediately or at a future date/time
- Tracking: Automatic open and click tracking
Campaigns progress through a lifecycle: Draft → Scheduled → Running → Completed.
Journeys
A journey is a multi-step marketing automation workflow. Journeys let you create conditional paths that customers flow through based on their behavior and attributes. Journey steps include:
- Sending emails
- Waiting for a period of time
- Checking conditions (field values, email engagement, segment membership)
- Updating customer fields
- Adding/removing from lists
- Firing webhooks
Journeys use a visual flow builder and support draft/publish versioning.
SMTP Connections
An SMTP connection is a configured email sending provider. Score CRM supports multiple providers including SendGrid, SparkPost, Mailgun, AWS SES, OCI Mail, and SMTP.com. You can use multiple connections with load balancing strategies.
Suppression
Suppression prevents emails from being sent to contacts who should not receive them. Contacts are suppressed when they:
- Hard bounce: Email address doesn't exist
- Soft bounce: Temporary delivery failure (auto-suppressed after 5 consecutive bounces)
- Complain: Mark your email as spam
- Unsubscribe: Click the unsubscribe link
- Manual: Added to suppression by an admin
Suppressed contacts are automatically excluded from all future sends.
Events
Events are tracked interactions with your emails. Score CRM tracks:
| Event | Description |
|---|---|
sent | Email handed off to SMTP provider |
delivered | Provider confirmed delivery |
opened | Recipient opened the email (tracked via pixel) |
clicked | Recipient clicked a link |
bounced | Email couldn't be delivered |
complained | Recipient marked as spam |
unsubscribed | Recipient clicked unsubscribe |
Events are ingested via webhooks from your email providers and stored for real-time analytics.