Customers interact with brands across multiple touchpoints—emails, websites, social media, and messaging platforms. Without the right tools, these interactions remain fragmented, making it difficult to get a complete view of your audience. This is where profile stitching comes in.

Profile stitching helps you connect various interactions to a single contact, providing a unified view of the customer journey. Instead of treating each touchpoint as a separate event, it links data from emails, web visits, form submissions, and now, even SMS and WhatsApp campaigns.

Curious about how profile stitching works? Check out our previous post to explore its capabilities in detail!

In addition to Zoho Marketing Automation’s profile stitching update for email marketing, it now extends to SMS and WhatsApp marketing, ensuring every web interaction generated through these channels is seamlessly tracked and linked to a contact’s profile.

Let’s break it down.

Until now, tracking SMS engagement beyond just open rates was a challenge. With this update, you can now see how your leads interact with your SMS campaigns and connect that data to their profiles.

Here’s what happens:

• When a contact receives an SMS containing a tracked link, their interaction isn’t immediately tied to their profile.

• If they click the link and land on your tracked website, Zoho Marketing Automation identifies them by matching their visitor ID (stored in cookies) with their contact details.

• From then on, their website visits and interactions will automatically be linked to their profile, giving you a complete picture of their engagement.

How profile stitching works for WhatsApp marketing   

WhatsApp is a personal and direct way to engage with leads, but tracking their journey beyond the chat has been tricky—until now.

With profile stitching, WhatsApp interactions can now be linked to web activity just like with SMS.

• If a lead receives a WhatsApp message with a tracked link and clicks it, their visit to your tracked website is logged.

• Zoho Marketing Automation identifies them using their visitor ID and maps the activity to their contact profile.

• Any further visits and interactions they make from WhatsApp links will be automatically stitched to their profile. 

Note:  Profile stitching applies only if the contact clicks a tracked link in the SMS or WhatsApp message. If they access the site from a different device, browser, or clear their cookies, their web activity history won’t be linked to their profile. However, their current session's activity will still be tracked, leaving them with a limited web activity record.